She Who Dares Wins
by AP Stacey
Summary: A sequel to the story "Serenity Point". If there is no fate but what we make, there is no success save the chances we take.
1. Chapter 1 : Home Sweet Home

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**DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything, including the oxygen used to fuel the fingers that typed this. FOX is my lord and master, its will be done.**

**PAIRING: Camerah, of course!**

**RATING: Some violence, adult-ish themes.**

**FEEDBACK: If you take the time read this, please take the time to let me know. **

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_She Who Dares Wins_, by A.P. Stacey.

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_Chapter I_  


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The top of the dresser which fitted snugly into the corner of the room was covered in unfamiliar scratches, rings and gouges. Hot cups left on the soft wood; nails accidentally dragged across the varnish; perfumes or brushes pulled across the table instead of picked up cleanly. A three-pane mirror was fixed to the dresser, thin cracks spreading out from the bolts fixing the glass to the wooden spars – where too many rough hands had pushed and pulled the mirrors every morning.

A simple desk stretched out in front of a bay window hidden by thick, purple curtains which had been hung years before. The tabletop was empty, save for a single green duffel bag which had spilled its contents in a line of clothes, stretching across the carpeted floor to the bed dominating the small room. Above the headboard a small painting hung in a silver frame, depicting a generic countryside scene of rolling, green hills rising up over stretching meadows of red poppies and yellow daffodils.

Sarah's nostrils flared as she buried her face into the pink pillow, the faint smell of a flowery fabric softener spreading a small smile across her face as she dragged her bare feet across the soft mattress, enjoying the feeling as she pulled the warm, comfortable duvet over her bare shoulders. Rolling over onto her back her eyes rolled around the room, taking in the dresser she hadn't used, the curtains she hadn't hung and the desk she had never sat at.

The small bag of clothes spilling out over the desk and floor, as well as the cache of weapons and ammunition hidden in the basement were her only possessions to survive from 2662 South Sycamore Street – their average middle-America suburban home, complete with white picket fence, that had been ransacked and then burnt to a blackened, twisted frame. Not simply by another Terminator on another mission of no-good, but by Skynet itself having travelled back to the present in the formidable shell of a T-X.

A formidable, liquid-metal covered machine that had murdered her former fiancée, Charley Dixon and countless others. A Terminator so relentless and powerful it had forced Sarah to form the most unlikely of alliances with the T-888 known as Cromartie, even then requiring a good slice of luck to defeat and cast into a pool of molten slag; to boil away the evil until all that remained was a glimmering pool of silver, floating atop a bubbling cauldron of yellow and orange.

Cast back to the burning hell from whence it came.

Even the first night spent in an unfamiliar house, in a bed she had never made herself under covers she'd never personally washed, could not make the raven-haired woman feel uneasy. Even the raw exhaustion of the final battle against Skynet itself – as well as the lingering effects of the injuries inflicted by said T-X – could not suppress the odd feeling of contentment that stretched up from Sarah's wiggling toes towards the smile on her lips.

The new-found peace that had replaced the raging, swirling maelstrom of self-doubt, fear and stress which had occupied her for most of the darkest hours of the morning, every morning, for as long as she could remember was undoubtedly hope. From the bottom of Pandora's - or Cyberdyne's – box it had sprung, chasing nightmarish shining endoskeletons and supercomputers bent on extermination. Willing to comfort the pathetic remains of the Human Race in the future when all was lost, and willing to comfort the handful of mere mortals in the present who might know something of the coming Apocalypse.

They had faced Skynet itself; not simply another Terminator, or Terminators with their own esoteric missions and objectives, but the power behind every gleaming metal monster. They had faced the singular thing responsible for the end of the world, and they had destroyed it. The fact it was a mere copy – a duplication of the source code, was irrelevant to Sarah. The mere achievement promised the slightest chance of a future – any future – for her son, who in turn was the only chance for the Human Race itself.

Thanks to living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, Terminators bled and the older woman felt great comfort in knowing they had given Skynet a bloody nose and a lot to think about.

Sarah ran a hand through her sleep-tussled hair, her eyes fixing on the door from the bedroom to the hallway now closed for the first time in years; comfortable enough in herself to accept the isolation it brought and joining the rest of the species in the simple act.

Defeating Skynet was not the sole reason for the peace that had settled her spirit and soul for the first time in as long as she could remember. That honour was shared by one of the very agents designed by the supercomputer to bring about their doom, reprogrammed and no longer emulating, but replicating emotions and behaviour. A Terminator that Sarah know knew as being a T-2000, a prototype that was as unique as any person on Earth was compared to another.

A Tin Miss that Sarah knew intimately as Cameron.

The nightmares that filled every rare hour of fidgeting sleep, filled with maniacal grinning metal which tore her loved ones to shreds, or gunned them down in a hail of bullets and bright plasma pulses, had been replaced. The screams of the dying and the mushroom clouds of nuclear detonations, wiping billions of lives from the face of the Earth were substituted. Instead of Armageddon, Sarah's sleep was spent dreaming and reliving the urgent exploration of Cameron, the recollection burned to her retinas so even with her eyes shut tightly, she still felt her fingers nimbly unbuttoning jeans, sliding fabric upwards to reveal the swell of the Terminator's breasts.

Frantic and urgent lovemaking in the dusty, stale surroundings of a second-storey control room overlooking an abandoned metalworks. The heaving of two chests pressing together, soft lips grazing against supple flesh and each other as they made contact and broke away repeatedly. Lithe fingertips mingling and grasping slightly larger, callused hands as hips below worked together and away in perfect rhythm.

Sarah shook her head slightly as she felt her own skin flush red with the excitement of it all. Her smile spread outwards and she threw the heavy duvet away, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and squeezing into the gap between the desk and the wall. Pushing away the thick curtains with her hand, she gazed out and above to the thousand twinkling points of light surrounding the pale Moon - a bright white dot in the sky lit by the light stolen from the invisible Sun.

A suburban street she had never seen before this morning stretched away to either side, every house lining the other side still - almost sleeping themselves save the light from the street lamps reflecting in their windows, cars parked in their driveways like silent guardians of the front doors beyond. The occasional chirrup of a bird woken by a gust of wind or a hunger for worms was the only sound, occasionally joined by the crunching of tyres on tarmac as a car out of sight trundled by, their headlights sweeping across the grass of the front garden.

Leaving the peaceful scene behind, Sarah slipped out into the hallway, her eyes travelling across the photographs of people she'd never met interspersed with stitched mosaics and wallpaper. She vaguely recognised a portrait of a man, garbed in a smart business suit and steel rimmed glasses as being the father of the family whose home the Connors' had rented, while they were relocating to Australia for six months. The reason for their move had been mentioned, though the future death of billions and the prospect of thermonuclear war often left little room to remember the finer details of life.

Glancing away from the wall towards John's bedroom, her ears picked up on the loud snoring before her eyes fixed on her son through the open bedroom door, a leg and an arm spread awkwardly out of the bed, mouth tipped wide open. His short fringe billowed up and down with every loud breath out, fingers unconsciously scratching at his nose as he slept. Sarah resisted the urge to roll her eyes as she spotted the two laptops – suspiciously brand new in appearance – stacked at the foot of the bed in an otherwise totally empty room, save the pile of clothes dumped messily in the corner.

She stopped before the door slightly ajar which led to Derek's new room. She hesitated, less willing to violate the troubled man's privacy than watch her own son snore loudly. Her sense of family more powerful than anything she might regret seeing Sarah eased her head into the room, her eyes settling on Derek who was not asleep in the bed, but sitting up against the wall beneath the window. A duvet wrapped around his shoulders, he grasped a half-empty glass bottle limply in an open hand, the amber liquid inside clearly identifying it as Scotch. A pistol in his other grip glinted from the street light outside.

Sighing softly, she eased back into the hallway. Sarah supposed war would never leave Derek, in his dreams or in his waking moments. He had sacrificed everything to defeat Skynet, including any hope for a time where he would not need to sleep with a gun in his hand or a bottle to his lips. Running a hand against the varnished banister she made her way downstairs, feeling the thunder of her heart in her chest as she scanned the hallway for the final member of their group.

Sarah and Cameron had been reunited with John and Derek for only a few days, though in the short time it had taken the pair to drive to the middle of nowhere to offload their unlikely ally in the shape of Cromartie, and return to the coastal lighthouse that had doubled as a safe house, both had decided against retelling their misadventure against Skynet. Although Sarah could see signs that maturity, compassion, intelligence and the smallest edge of ruthlessness were combining in her son to create the future leader of the Free Earth Forces, he was not that man yet.

She felt no compunction to put additional stress on his young shoulders with the revelation that Skynet itself had returned to track him. Derek had only a tenuous connection to reality, this reality, left – a single string of sanity which kept his head upon his shoulders and Sarah was acutely aware that any major twist in a future that the veteran had already fought for, might see it snap. The consequences for them all could be devastating.

There was only the slightest flaw – other than the lack of the truth – in keeping their titanic battle with the T-X as anything but a misadventure with Cromartie, or any other T-888.

The blossoming relationship between herself and Cameron.

The issue was not a question of whether Sarah still felt the same – despite the fact that she felt more peaceful with herself than at any stage in the years before, she had still laid awake in bed, longing to have just the company of the lithe girl at her side. Longing for nimble fingertips with impossible strength to lay across her stomach and thigh, to graze the Terminator's temple, cheek and lips with her own and lose herself in bright blue eyes.

With the logistics of emergency house-finding, and the simply circumstances of their fight against the future it had been impossible for Sarah to find the time to be alone with Cameron – not in the least because her son, unable to voice his concerns as an independent teenager, had needed the closeness of his mother to reassure him following their absence. Alongside Derek's need for a thorough (though not entirely truthful) debriefing it had been an exhausting few days.

Sarah blinked as she stopped in front of the refrigerator, her thoughts having occupied her totally as her feet continued on. Shivering slightly at the feel of the cold tiles against her bare feet, she shuffled across to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, peering around the arch into the darkness of the empty room. Padding back the way she came, holding her breath as her ears strained to hear any evidence of anyone downstairs, a frown creased her forehead.

Where had her Tin Miss gotten to?

* * *

Cameron pushed the heavy front door open only far enough to slip her slight frame through the gap, pressing black fingerless gloves up against the frosted glass and pushing it closed with the click of the locking bolt sliding into place, and the gentle thump of the deadbolt reinforcing. Her HUD effortlessly saw through the frosting out into the quiet street as she kept her gaze on the porch for several seconds, attention moving to a white cat gracefully leaping down from the guttering of the house, opposite to the roadside.

Satisfied there was nothing more than the cat to disturb the peace of the still night, the Terminator glanced down and patted the dark red stains splashed across the thighs of her faded grey jeans. Scrutinising the palms of her gloves to make sure they were dry enough not to make an unsightly mess on their latest home, Cameron turned on the flat soles of her scuffed black boots and almost stepped drove her forehead into Sarah's chin.

"Not very stealthy," The older woman scoffed, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back against the archway which led into the kitchen. "You can see a cat at fifty paces, but not a person right behind you – are you sure infiltration is your speciality?"

Sarah narrowed her eyes as she struggled to see much of the Terminator in the filtered street light beyond the girl's outline, the slightest hint of brown tangles falling about slight shoulders and the slightest streak of red across the collar of her purple leather jacket. As she stepped forward Cameron moved backwards against the wall and stepped aside, as if to pass the older woman.

"I was securing the perimeter," Cameron clipped in reply, much to the dissatisfaction of Sarah. The older woman stepped across from the archway and trapped the girl in the front hallway, the crunching of tarmac under tyres outside and the accompanying flash of a passing car's headlights illuminating Cameron's face for the briefest few seconds.

Slithers of a silver skull glinted back in trenches of gouged flesh at the passing car, a shimmering grey contrasting starkly with the pale flesh surrounding. Dried, flaking blood painted narrow borders around each wound on the temple, the left cheek and underneath the jawbone on the right side of the Terminator's face. A trickle of blood was caught by the light midway from the lips to the crest of the chin, on a sloping path down to the neck. Cameron moved to turn her face away but the revelation had been made.

Sarah was across the short distance between the two in a single stride, hands rising to gently cup Cameron's face between careful fingers as her eyes narrowed in concern and the hint of fear. "What happened?" She whispered harshly, using the fabric of her dressing gown's sleeve to dab at the weeping wounds on the Terminator's face. Instinctively without the slightest pause, she moved her hands to hold Cameron's head gingerly at the temple, tipping it forward slightly to plant a gentle kiss on the pale forehead.

Cameron's HUD faded to blackness as her eyes rolled closed, her Chip pausing in all the activity of running a sentient machine to experience the fullest moment of the soft lips as they grazed against the flesh above the metal. In recent weeks the prototype T-2000 had learned to replicate many emotions uniquely, having experienced what could only be described as irritation with the domestic situation which had evolved after their reunion with Derek and John. Allowing for the time a mother spent with her son following a separation, Cameron had felt once more on the outside, looking in.

A few days ago she would have expected nothing more; a few days ago she would have spent the majority of her time not taken up with conversation or company cleaning weaponry, or patrolling the home or simply standing, watching the world turn and pass her by.

A few days ago she had not experienced love – the purest and most impossible emotion to emulate truthfully, the most Human aspect of Humanity itself and something that should have been totally beyond the remit of a machine. A few days ago she had not felt Sarah's lips on her own, and the raven-haired woman deep inside her.

Until a few days ago, she had not been alive.

"Cameron?" A concerned voice whispered, breaking through the confused thoughts dominating her runtime and prompting her eyes to open again. "I was at the harbour," She replied finally to the question already several minutes old. "I engaged a T-888 in combat."

"I won," She added hastily at the concern that seemed to double in the gentle eyes fixed on her own. Sarah suppressed the urge to smile, instead focused on the painful cuts and gouges that littered the beautiful girl's features. Dabbing at the wound on the girl's temple a final time, she lowered her fingers to take Cameron by the hand, leading her through the archway into the kitchen. Flicking on the small strip light mounted over the sink, Sarah's eyes winced momentarily as she adjusted to the harsh white light, the darkness around the window looking out onto the side of the house next door receding.

Snatching a bottle of medicinal disinfectant and a roll of adhesive bandages from the biscuit tin pressed into service as a first aid box, she twisted the top off and sniffed at the dark brown liquid, her face twisting into a frown at the smell. "Why were you down there, Tin Miss? Know something we don't?"

"Skynet destroyed all of the intelligence gathered by the resistance," Cameron reiterated, ignoring the sting of the antiseptic as it made contact with the raw, bloodied flesh. "We don't have any leads any more. We don't have names, or places or dates – I wanted to find something that would help us."

Sarah's eyes narrowed in suspicion as she dabbed another handful of gauze against the upturned bottle, squeezing out the excess. Having enjoyed the uninterrupted sleep which came with the satisfaction – however short-lived – of sending Skynet back from the metal hell from whence it came, she hadn't noticed Cameron coming or going. The fact disturbed her more than a little.

Sarah leaned against the counter, the feeling of contentedness fading rapidly to be replaced by a welling torrent of anger. "You went down to the docks alone without telling me where you were going, without letting anybody know where you were going. You went looking for trouble and instead of reporting back so we could discuss doing something about it, you went in yourself. Is that about the lay of it?"

Cameron cocked her head to the side, the exposed metal of her endoskeleton beneath flashing under the kitchen light. "I won." She repeated.

Sarah slammed the bottle down against the counter with enough force that it would surely have shattered, had it been made of glass and not plastic. The stench of the antiseptic wafted up through the kitchen as it spilled out to pool on the worktop, the older woman fixing a dangerous stare on the Terminator. "You weren't designed to fight other machines," She whispered harshly, making no suggestion that her statement was a question. "You do it because sometimes, there's no other option. Well this time girlie, there was every option other than to go ploughing in. What if you'd come back with more than a few scratches? What if you hadn't come back at all?"

Cameron shook her head, hands hanging limply by her side. "I would not have endangered the mission or John."

"This isn't about John or the fucking mission!" Sarah spat, her voice raising above the whisper so that she cut herself off abruptly, worried her anger would bring Derek or her son downstairs and make a frustrating situation worse. "This is about something happening to you, something I can't stop. Maybe what happened between us doesn't mean anything to you. Is that it?"

Sarah placed a hand under Cameron's jaw and jerked the Terminator's head around, so that bright blue eyes focused on an equally powerful gaze. "Do I mean anything to you?"

Powerful fingers wrapped around Sarah's outstretched wrist, pulling her hand away in a vice-like grip that the older woman did not even try to fight against, lest she break a bone in the futile attempt. Sarah's eyes followed her own hand as it was slowly pulled downwards and pushed between the open halves of the Terminator's purple leather jacket, her palm pressing down just above and between the swell of Cameron's breasts which rose up underneath a simple black tank top. Sarah pushed her fingertips down, tracing the shimmering glitter laid in a spiral on top of the fabric of the top.

"Do you feel anything?" Cameron asked quietly.

Sarah could feel the thundering of her own heart in her chest, as it threatened to break free of the ribs which seemed to strain just to hold it in place. The sound of her own blood as it thundered through veins and arteries threatened to rise to a deafening crescendo and she had no doubt as to how it all looked, the flesh of her hand pressed against Cameron's breast flushing scarlet. Sarah licked her lips nervously, suddenly finding her throat dry and raspy.

Suppressing the urge to shiver as a small, but surprisingly warm hand slide between the folds of her dressing gown, Sarah closed her eyes as she felt Cameron's palm press gently against her chest directly over her hard-working heart. "The Tinman did not have a heart," The machine-girl whispered. "When they banged on his chest there was an echo – the Scarecrow thought it was beautiful."

Cameron's eyes rolled closed as she absorbed the intimacy. "My breast plate is rigid; I don't have an echo but I am like the Tinman because I don't have a heart. He didn't need one to feel, I don't need a heart to feel ..."

Bright eyes opened and fixed on Sarah's, betraying uncertainty. Her Chip worked as quickly as its operations-per-minute allowed, collating data, forming hypotheses and discarding conclusions in a desperate attempt to catalogue the feelings which flowed from metal to flesh and back again. Sensing her confusion, Sarah's lips spread in a wide smile, the hand she pressed against Cameron slowly moving back, to wrap around the nimble fingers hidden in the folds of her own dressing gown.

"I don't know what you feel here," Sarah whispered as their fingertips mingled and moved across, to tap against Cameron's breast gently before moving up to rest against the Terminator's temple. "I know you don't know what you're feeling up here either. I know your Chip is busy working through graphs and statistical analysis and equations that would need an extra-long whiteboard to write but you're learning that not everything can be analysed like that. You're breaking every rule, bridging two worlds Cameron ..."

Sarah took the hand clasped in her own and planted a light kiss on the knuckles, "My Tin Miss has a heart," She soothed. "It's just not in her chest."

Cameron opened her mouth to reply, but closed it again answering with the slightest nod instead. She felt Sarah squeeze her hand tenderly, before watching her stand and wipe away the spilt antiseptic on the worktop with a cloth from the sink. Stretching a roll of bandages out, the older woman appropriated a pair of scissors from the drawer and turned back to face the Terminator.

"Let's put you back together, girlie."

* * *

Derek rolled over until his back was pressed against the floor, his eyes fluttering open to squint at the bright light streaming through the thin curtains flapping against the window frame. He coughed loudly, pain wracking his body as he felt his eyes water in reaction to the tremendous thundering against his temple, passing around to cross his forehead. Stifling the urge to groan his nostrils flared as he tried to suck in a lungful of oxygen, finding his nose utterly blocked and a tight muscle tension creeping down his neck and back.

He sat up and struggled to keep his bearings as his vision swam, inner ear totally at odds with the rest of his system. Shaking his head vigorously he felt raking coughs reverberate through his throat, folding his arms across his chest as he swallowed saliva that had become thick, and bitter in his mouth. Using an unsteady hand on the windowsill Derek pulled himself up to his feet, the headache pounding his consciousness forcing him to close his eyes for a moment.

Stumbling forwards, he snatched the bottle of scotch from the floor and looked at it through narrowed eyes, roughly unscrewing the top and bringing the neck of the bottle up to his nose. Trying to breathe through the blockage Derek could no more catch a whiff of the powerful spirit than he could catch a molecule of oxygen, roughly setting the Scotch down on the windowsill and making his careful way to the bathroom and the mirror mounted above the sink.

Puffy, inflamed skin drew crescent shapes underneath his bloodshot eyes as he ran a hand through his hair, liberally splashing cold water up from the sink to his face and enjoying the momentarily cooling. Cupping his hands up around his mouth he coughed loudly, swallowing the rising bile in his throat with a grimace and fumbling for the cabinet mounted to the wall beside him, for the medication inside that wasn't his own.

Scooping out the ibuprofen, paracetamol, cold and flu treatment and anything else that might look helpful, he quickly narrowed the half dozen flimsy boxes down, to a handful of pills of varying colour and size. Filling the other palm with water from the whistling tap, he downed them all in a single motion. Smacking his lips together and scratching at the stubble covering his chin, Derek ignored the feverish shivers that were threatening to run freely down his spine.

He needed a drink.

* * *

John's nose was a finely tuned piece of olfactory machinery, his eyes rolling open only a few seconds after his nostrils had flared to drink deep the waft of pancakes, which had coiled lazily upstairs and through his open door. He sniffed the air a few more times even as his conscious mind caught up with his senses, his hands groping for the shirt crumpled and abandoned on the floor. Roughly pulling it over his head, John scratched at his back and head as he padded into the hall, licking his lips in anticipation as he headed downstairs.

Eyes still half-closed as he traipsed into the kitchen, he almost collapsed into one of the wooden chairs surrounding the compact dining table. John mumbled a vague good morning to his mother at the stove with her back to him, and the ever-present Terminator – killer turned protector – perched on the edge of her seat, palms resting on her thighs, utterly still, as if she had been carved from a great piece of marble, not simply sitting.

Cameron's head cocked to the side towards her future reprogrammer and "saviour", her lips spreading in a warm smile. "Good morning John; did you dream?"

Taken aback by the warmth of the smile, the teenager shook his head with the slightest chuckle. Cameron's merging of Terminator characteristics with random human mannerisms was a mixing pot which never failed to surprise, although a small part of him, somewhere deep inside, found it deeply disturbing at just how beautiful a smile a mechanical assassin could show off. "I don't dream much. Most people my age dream of future robots and saving the world in their dreams … I live that while I'm awake, so maybe my brain takes time off when it gets dark."

"I don't sleep," She replied in a way that almost seemed forlornly to John, "But thank you for explaining."

The teenager nodded and mumbled something as his attention was pulled away to the fluffy, light yellow circles appearing in front of him on the tabletop. Taking the briefest moment to breathe in the warm, buttery scent John snatched up a fork and impaled two pancakes triumphantly, dragging them back to his plate and squirting entirely too much maple syrup over them, the plate and the table cloth.

Sarah rolled her eyes as she leaned over her son, ignoring the chomping and slapping of his lips as he demolished the food so quickly, she doubted any of the batter had time to touch his taste buds before it had arrived in his stomach. She set a plate down in front of Cameron, regarding the Terminator with a warm smile which was lost by the teenager engorging himself to the left and the shuffling form of Derek taking a seat to the right. Dragging the last of the pancakes onto a fresh plate with a fork she set them down in front of the grizzled, unshaven veteran, realising he hadn't cast a single venomous or wary glance at Cameron for fully thirty seconds.

"You feeling okay?" The raven-haired woman asked as she retrieved the steaming mug of black coffee from the counter and held it up to her nose with both hands, drinking the bitter aroma deeply.

Derek stabbed at the pancakes with the fork, pushing them around the plate and breaking them into smaller parts but never making any attempt to actually eat them. "I'm fine," He grunted, blinking several times as his eyes threatened to water him to blindness. Sarah cast a glance over at her son in time to see the last scrap of batter disappear from his plate, then to Cameron who had methodically eaten half of the single pancake on her plate. What she saw around her assured Sarah her cooking – this time – was not at fault. Her forehead creasing in a frown, she could see Derek stifling a cough, and doing his best to avoid sniffing through an obviously blocked nose.

Sipping the coffee and enjoying the bitterness and strength as it washed over her palette, Sarah leaned back against the kitchen counter and pretended for the briefest moment, that the scene in front of her, near-domestic bliss, was a regular occurrence four or five times a week - not the peaceful eye of a deadly metal storm that would undoubtedly pass over them once more, as soon as it had gathered its strength and wits again. Her eyes crossed to watch Cameron push a fluffy clump of batter between her soft lips, the Terminator's bright eyes travelling up from the plate to match the stare.

Sipping from the mug, Sarah nodded her head slightly. "Obviously with Cromartie destroying all the resistance intelligence we had," She began, attracting the table's attention, seamlessly telling the little white lie as to who had "really" burnt their former home to the ground. "We've got nothing specific to follow-up on, but Cameron found something down by the docks that might be interesting. Skynet interesting."

"It's a warehouse," The Terminator added, returning her hands to her knees. "Rented by a company called New Ararabee Heavy Lifting. Their corporate headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California."

John frowned, missing the narrowing of his mother's eyes at the mention of the location in California, settling back into his chair and scratching at the side of his head. "Never heard of them," He shrugged, stifling the urge to yawn as he filled the glass by his plate with orange juice.

"They're a transport logistics company that was once a part of Cyberdyne Systems," Cameron clarified, finally gaining the full attention of John and Derek at the mention of a name that become synonymous with Judgement Day, and the end of the world. They were bought by a computer research and development company called ZeiraCorp, along with a number of Cyberdyne assets, six months ago and are in the process of shipping equipment between office and manufacturing sites."

John nodded, the orange juice forgotten. "I'll try and get hold of their shipping manifests, see if there's anything on-line about just what they're moving around. Who're ZeiraCorp? Something we should be worried about?"

"Anyone dealing with computers is something we should worry about," Derek added gruffly, barely suppressing the powerful urge to cough as he blinked several times to clear his sight. Sarah finished the dregs of the coffee growing cold in her mug, and shrugged her shoulders slightly at the comment; knowing while it was accurate, they'd spend their entire lives – pre-apocalypse and post-atomic horror – chasing shadows if they hunted every single IT-related company in North America alone.

"The link with Cyberdyne is reason enough," Sarah clarified, bringing the discussion back to its focus. "Cameron thinks they're due to receive another shipment tomorrow morning, so if John can find anything remotely interesting in the manifests, we'll head out there and see what comes our way."

John nodded, returning his attention to the orange juice whilst Derek pushed his chair from the table, and disappeared through the archway to the hall. Making sure her son's attention was firmly placed on pouring the juice, Sarah threw the smallest wink at the Terminator sat opposite. Cameron's head cocked to the side, her forehead slightly creased in confusion before returning the wink in an obvious, poor copy of the original – complete with exaggerated facial tic and blink.

The raven-haired woman resisted the urge to chuckle as she collected the plates from the table, gathering them noisily into the sink. Her mind drifted back to Cameron's response when Sarah had asked how the Tin Miss felt after their hurried, passionate, urgent lovemaking, before the brutal battle with Skynet that had almost taken the older woman's life and along with it the possible future of Mankind.

"Almost Human," Cameron had replied.

Her head tipped down towards the plates soaking in the hot, soapy water - hiding her face and a smile at just how appropriate the phrase was. On the path towards the merging of Cameron's machine and new-found humanity, the Tin Miss had only just started out on a very long, very winding Yellow Brick Road of her own.

* * *

Cameron pushed the last of the domed rounds - each marked with a thick red band running around their bodies - into the breech of the shotgun and brought the two halves of the divided barrel back together with a loud click. Feeling the weight of the weapon in her hands for a moment, she carefully placed it on the small table set against the wall of the hallway, beside the telephone receiver. Reaching up to the row of hooks bolted opposite she snatched her purple leather jacket from its resting place, pulling it over her exposed shoulders.

Black fingerless gloves that extended up to her elbows slipped through the sleeves, blue eyes lowering to adjust the metal-studded belt that circled the dark grey combat trousers held tight against her slight waist. Cameron held her arms out and regarded herself, nodding in satisfaction.

"You look good," Sarah offered as she slipped through the archway from the kitchen, slamming a magazine into her favoured pistol and cocking the chamber with a free hand. Truth be told the older woman would have said that, and meant it, had the Terminator been wearing a refuse bag from head to toe; the obvious curves of the girl's body particularly easy to follow given her usual taste for clothes that hugged and hung loose in precisely the right way.

Pulling her own jacket from the hook and over her shoulders, Sarah felt blue eyes on her back and turned to return the gaze, becoming ever more keenly aware of the slightest hint of warmth – the slightest spark beyond the mechanical that seemed reserved for the raven-haired woman alone and no-one else. "I like your hair," The Terminator complimented in a genuinely truthful, if slightly weak attempt. Sarah chuckled as she tightened the band pulling her locks back in a ponytail, pushing the pistol into the waistband of her jeans.

"Flattery will get you everywhere," She teased, doubly enjoying the confusion that marred Cameron's face.

Derek resisted the urge to lean against the wall of the kitchen, struggling to suck in enough oxygen through a dry mouth as his head lolled to the side, grimacing at the pain which seemed to radiate from every muscle and tendon in his back as well as the bones they were attached to. Groping for the pistol on the worktop he slipped inside the folds of his thick green overcoat, running a hand through hair slick with sweat and stifling a cough that rattled through his lungs and chest. He shook his head as if trying to banish the sickness from his body.

John hopped down the stairs, missing the last few steps as he ducked into the kitchen and grabbed an apple from the silver bowl on the dining table, taking a bite as he glanced over the pistol held in his free hand and looked up towards the man who had only recently been promoted from stranger to uncle. "You okay?"

"You eat too much fruit," Derek replied with a forced smile that hid the pain he felt thumping in his head. "Couldn't move for the stuff in your workshop. Couldn't move for much else really – you're not the cleanest commander."

John caught the wistful sigh at the end of the veteran's words and felt more able to appreciate the difficulty of a man who had spent his entire life in battle, fighting a brutal war against an implacable and calculating foe, only to find himself unceremoniously dumped years before it had even started; only to find himself dumped in amongst those he didn't trust, those he did and those he would rather put a bullet to.

The pair moved into the hallway, completing the group.

"You're ill," Cameron said simply, her eyes fixed on Derek as he rubbed at his own. Her HUD was more than capable of picking out any one of a number of obvious symptoms including increased heart rate, erratic breathing, temperature bordering on the feverish, excessive perspiration and dilated pupils. Her primary function might have been murder, but the Terminator was more than capable of playing doctor.

Derek scoffed, waving her away with the vaguest of gestures. "I'm fine," He grumbled, swallowing back the bile which threatened to rise up from his throat.

Without warning she brought the muzzle of the shotgun up to bare, much to the horror of John whose eyes drifted up from the apple he was enjoying to the gun painted vaguely in his direction. Sarah had her arm across immediately to try to force the shotgun in a different direction, her toned arms still no match for the metal actuators underneath Cameron's pale flesh.

Without hesitation instinct instantly took control of Derek's hands, banishing their slight shaking and clearing his vision and mind with a single purpose. In a fluid movement he brought his pistol out from the folds of his jacket and took aim, his eyes narrowing as he centred the muzzle's aim on the Terminator's forehead. Anger clouded his features and his jaw set tight against the teeth above.

Cameron stepped forward with her aim now totally trained on the veteran of the future resistance, blue eyes cold and reflective so that if Derek were not so focused on his own life he might have seen his own face in their shining depths. Her voice was a cold monotone, reserved for the ones and zeroes which made up the most basic aspects of her programming and in Derek's eyes, what separated her from him. "You will be terminated."

Derek's finger instantly snaked inside the trigger guard and squeezed, his aim sure and his legs slightly bent at the knee to absorb the pistol's recoil.

A dull click resonated more loudly than usual in the hallway, taking advantage of the fact that no-one dared breathe who was capable of the act. When there was no muzzle flash, no snap of propellant igniting and no screech of metal breaking through skin to strike metal and ricochet, three sets of eyes centred the bright blue pair. "You have not loaded your weapon," Cameron clipped helpfully.

"You'll get us all killed," She added more slowly, with a warmer inflection. "There is chicken soup in the cupboard above the sink, and several sachets of hot lemon drink. You should mix the sachets with boiling water and drink regularly to rehydrate yourself."

John's mouth, which had until then remained agape, twisted into a smile. The sound of his rich laughter spun the situation from a tense stand-off to a farce, the teenager having to support himself with his hands on his thighs as he doubled over. He slapped the wall, his eyes beginning to water. Derek lowered his weapon while somehow resisting the urge to check the grip and confirm what he already knew was true, his face an unreadable mask.

Sarah's shoulders slumped as she let the wall take her weight, wiping at the thin sheen of sweat that had prickled her forehead. In the span of a few moments she had gone from tense but focused on the mission at hand, to pensive at the stand-off, then terrified as she watched Cameron appear to choose that moment over all others to reset – to return to her core directive or otherwise kill each of them where they stood.

Hearing her son's rich laughter echo through the hallway, she came to realise no evil was afoot, that what she had seen was the bizarre mixture of a machine's cold logic partially melted by the warmth of human abstractness, and flexibility to situations. The manner she had chosen being nonetheless totally inappropriate, somehow Sarah knew that had it been herself or John in that position, there would have been no negotiation by the barrel of a gun.

Wordlessly Derek dropped the useless weapon onto the telephone table, pulling his overcoat from his shoulders and hanging it against the hook on the opposite wall. Scratching at the back of his neck he turned and disappeared into the kitchen, the noise of cupboard doors banging open and thudding closed with more force than strictly necessary filtering through.

"He's got the flu," Cameron clarified as she lowered the shotgun and pulled the front door open. "He needs plenty of bed rest."

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The piers stretched into the ocean like splayed fingers from a palm, bundles of grimy, rusting piping and steel tresses running underneath and over each mammoth concrete spar. Dozens of crane jibs hung lazily over each pier, swaying slightly in the high winds, load chains clinking and clanking as the occasional forklift motored past their bases ferrying crates and boxes. Arranged in rows of three, immense warehouses that had once seen better days – sporting cracked, filthy windows and rotting timbers – stretched backwards from the ocean towards the bustling city.

Sarah felt her stomach twist slightly, as she glanced down through the gaps in the steel plating and wooden planks which constituted the floor of the dock she stood on. Shifting blue sloshed lazily for as far as her eyes could see down and across, making it seem as if the entire facility rested on the sea itself, rather than stretching out from any firm grip on the land – making it seem as if the entire dock might simply float away at any given moment.

The slight grimace on the face of her son made it obvious he felt the same, as they followed Cameron's quick walk between a foul-smelling pile of rotting netting coiled into a heap and an untidy pile of crab cages. The older woman spared a moment for the meshing of the harbour between the old ways of fishing and the modern era of fossil fuels, global transport and logistics, and maritime construction.

"This warehouse is rented by ZeiraCorp," Cameron gestured towards a stained wooden door beginning to rot along its top and bottom edges in the corrosive salt of the sea air, a rusting steel plate bolted to its front. "The Sun will be up soon; we shouldn't be here when it does."

Sarah and John both nodded as the Terminator took a hold of the padlock in a single hand and tore it – along with its locking arm and the plate mounting it to the door – free with the slightest squeak of twisting metal. Leaning down and lifting the lid on a number of empty storage bins resting against the side of the warehouse, she dropped the shattered lock inside and hit it from view.

Cameron's HUD instantly adjusted to the bright light filling the warehouse from powerful spotlights mounted in the rafters of the ceiling, far quicker than the two pairs of human eyes, which allowed her to see the figures standing at the far end of the building before they saw Cameron, the girl pulling Sarah and John behind a stack of crates with an irresistible tug of force. The older woman lost her footing at the sudden movement and would have fallen hard to the floor, but for the deceptively strong arms which cushioned her fall effortlessly.

Sarah glanced up at the beautiful face a few inches from her own, marvelling at the ability of the lithe Terminator to accelerate her heart to a hammering pace, and dry her throat almost instantly. Conscious of the raised eyebrow from her son, and their presence in a possible enemy-held warehouse, she reluctantly broke the embrace and carefully peered around the edge of the crate.

The four walls were stacked to a dozen feet outwards by large shipping crates which themselves were piled three or four times her own body in height, the middle of the warehouse clear apart from a single shipping container. Once painted a bright orange, it had been dulled by a life spent on the decks of who knew how many merchant ships plying their trade across the face of the Earth, rusted by salt water and salt air.

Three figures, too far away to be described as much more than men in grey jumpsuits and matching flat-peaked caps, milled around the container. Sarah pursed her lips, weighing up their options. "Are they human?"

Cameron's eyes narrowed as her HUD delved underneath the men's' skin, to find crimson in their veins and more importantly, bone without a trace of metal beyond what appeared to be an old shrapnel wound in the shoulder of one of the faceless three. Satisfied they were not Terminators in any way, shape or form Cameron decided the options had been weighed and stepped out from cover, walking methodically towards the centre of the warehouse.

"I take it they're human," John whispered sarcastically as he checked his pistol and glanced at his mother. Sarah rolled her eyes as she watched the retreating form of the small Terminator, feeling sweat begin to make the grip of her weapon slick. Gesturing with her head the pair slipped between the narrow gap where the crates had not quite been left flush against the warehouse wall, making their own way forwards. With her back flush against the wall, Sarah could not see the container or its guards but could heard the shouts of the men as they presumably caught sight of Cameron.

"Who the hell are you!" One of the men shouted, as he stepped forward to intercept Cameron as she closed on the container in the centre of the chamber. He was some six feet and more in height but with a portly frame, so that the belt around his waist pushed his stomach upwards and over. The slightest hint of grey tarnished the cropped brown of his scalp, wrinkles around his narrowing eyes and worry lines carved into his forehead hinting at his advancing years.

The tall stranger opened his mouth again but found the words on the tip of his tongue lost, as his eyes settled on the powerful blue stare that seemed to drill straight through his face and continue on behind. He raised a hand to bar her way, even as Cameron slowed to stop directly in front of him. "You shouldn't be in here--"

His words became garbled in a strangled cry, as an impossibly powerful grip in an otherwise petite-looking hand took a hold of his chest by the overalls , lifting the heavy man from his feet and abruptly flinging him over the young girl's head. He crashed through the top of a crate fully ten feet away, his body disappearing from sight in splinters of shattered wood and a billowing cloud of whatever the crate had once held.

Cameron took a step backwards to steady herself as a hail of bullets raked her chest, tearing the fabric of her top apart, gouging the flesh away in splashes of red, but finding absolutely no way through the dense metal now shining and glinting underneath the warehouse's powerful lights. Several bangs rang out as bullets answered bullets, the Terminator turning her head to watch Sarah lean out from the cover of the crates by the wall and lay down covering fire.

The shorter of the two remaining men, who had pulled the machine gun from a small box on the floor as Cameron had disposed of his colleague, threw himself down – narrowly avoiding the lead which punched holes in the crate he had shielded with his own body a moment before. Rolling to the left he brought the smoking muzzle of his weapon to bare towards Sarah and let rip; a hail of bullets gouging concrete from the wall of the warehouse and then shattering wood as his aim swept along.

"It's one of them!" He shouted to his last remaining comrade who had disappeared from immediate sight. He growled in frustration as the roar of the gun faded to a dull click-click-lick of a spent magazine. No sooner had he pulled the case from the breech and slammed a fresh magazine into place, than the thin shadow of Cameron cast itself over his features, his eyes widening in horror. He squeezed the trigger in panic, his aim wild and poor gouging a chunk of clothing and skin from her left shoulder before punching round after round up into the ceiling.

Cameron delivered the instep of her boot into the stranger's hand, eliciting a cry of pain as the bones cracked on impact and his fingers released the machine gun in spasm. Stepping forward the Terminator used the side of her foot to send the weapon skidding across the smooth concrete floor, far out of the groaning man's hope of reaching. Reaching down she closed a fingerless glove about his throat and with a single motion hauled him up to his feet and then off them – dangling the stranger in the air, his body jerking and fidgeting in pain.

Sarah cautiously stepped out from the remains of the crate that had acted as her cover, before it had been sheared in half by the raking machine gun fire. Ignoring the divots gouged into the concrete beside her, she swept the immediate area to the right of the container. Creeping forward – her eyes following her aim – Sarah caught the darkness of the twilight sky out beyond an open door, previously hidden behind the shipping container. It seemed as if the third man had managed to give the them the slip.

Having seen precisely the same as his mother, John shoved his pistol into the waistband of his trousers and darted out from the cover towards the container. Sarah threw a hand out to stop him, fingers curling against the fabric of his shoulder and slipping away as she reacted a moment too late. He had gotten no further forward than a few steps, when his eyes glanced up to see the third stranger step out from the crates on the far side so that he stood facing John, with Cameron and her struggling prisoner between.

The third man snatched up the machine gun kicked away earlier, and took his aim.

Cameron reacted in the few moments it took for the missing stranger to arm himself and plant his feet to fire, casting the struggling body at the end of her arm away to the floor several feet away, with the thud of ribs breaking against concrete. She stepped to present her front to the gunman even as the muzzle previously pointed at John flared; round after round tearing from the barrel and striking through her flesh to bounce against her endoskeleton.

Sarah did not miss the chance and darted from cover, making up the ground to her son and taking a firm hold of the scruff of his sweatshirt, dragging the stunned teenager back and around the corner of the shipping container. The howling of the machine gun still reverberating through the warehouse she placed both hands on his face and pulled it round to face hers. "Are you okay? Are you hurt? Are you hit?"

"I'm fine mom," He grumbled, embarrassment now mixing with fear and causing him to avert his eyes from hers. "Go help her."

Sarah nodded, patting him on the shoulder and saving the lecture for another time. Pressing her back against the rear of the shipping container and using the noise of the machine gun to hide her approach, she stalked along the wall so as to come behind the third worker and catch him by surprise. Checking her pistol Sarah bided her time, waiting for the magazine of a weapon designed to cut down platoons of men but struggling to stop a single Terminator to empty. When a familiar click-click-lick replaced the roar, she stepped around the corner.

She brought her pistol up to bare, even as her eyes caught the spent machine gun falling to the floor. With a move that seemed more suitable for a military man than warehouse dogsbody, the third worker swung a rifle into his hands from its position slung over his back. Fully half as long again as the weapon just discarded, the rifle was an all-black affair bristling with a silver-finish muzzle which spread open like a pair of menacing jaws. The majority of the midsection of the gun was composed of a spinning cylinder, which was quickly increasing in turning speed. A small glass capsule sat atop the strange weapon's body – bolted to the rest of the rifle by a metal cage, filled with a bubbling, bright yellow liquid.

Recollection filled Sarah followed quickly by fear, as the older woman realised that this was not the first she had seen such a weapon. Not only had she seen it before but Sarah had also felt it in her hands, using its devastating energy to tear Cromartie – flesh and endoskeleton alike – limb from limb in a bank vault in down town Los Angeles, at the beginning of the latest chapter of their fight against Skynet.

She had no time to think, only to act. Her finger snaked inside the trigger guard and squeezed down, the flash of the muzzle and the bang of the bullet delivered into the temple of the worker, who did not even see his killer emerge from the shadows. Perhaps acting out of some involuntary spasm, or out of a last gasp act of maliciousness his own finger pulled the trigger of the isotope weapon before the charging process was complete.

A terrific arc of coruscating lightning leapt from the discharge point of the weapon, bending and contorting in anything but a straight line. It seared through the air and smashed against Cameron, who in the entire process of Sarah's discovery and action, had only managed to take a single step forward towards the man now lying dead at the older woman's feet. The Terminator was lifted from the ground, arms held outwards stiffly as she was blasted backwards to smash against, and through, the faded orange metal of the shipping container.

Sarah was at the smoking, shattered hole so quickly that the residual tendrils of energy from the blast were still licking around the wound in the shipping container, prickling her exposed flesh. An acrid cloud of thick smoke obscured everything inside, stinging her eyes and making it impossible to see or breathe. Coughing loudly, she waved her hands in front of the hole as the cloud slowly dissipated.

Cameron lay on a bed of shattered computer consoles, their sensitive electronic innards vomited out from their casings by the force of the impact and scattered about the floor of the container. Her arms and legs were splayed outwards but not bent at their joints, making her resemble a doll posed haphazardly. Stepping over the sharp, serrated remains of the thin wall now blown open, Sarah stooped to her knees and placed her hands gently on the girl's shoulders.

"Cameron?" She whispered harshly, desperately. Shaking with more force the Terminator's head lolled forwards and backwards with a sickening looseness, blue eyes open, but glassy and vacant – staring into nothingness. Running a hand through Cameron's brown locks and pushing them clear of her features, her fingers moved up to cup the delicate face and the cuts which had marred its beauty. "Cameron?" She pleaded.

A thunderous rumble rose from absolute silence, snapping Sarah's head around to gaze at her surroundings. The entire container was filled with computer equipment beyond the older woman's understanding – banks of sophisticated-looking junctions and control systems interspersed with the occasional status monitor. A round, silver-coloured pad divided into eight sections sat directly above her head, a matching emitter beneath their feet with thick, armoured cabling connecting both to the equipment surrounding.

A handful of the monitors leapt to life, displaying nothing but a background of blue before exchanging the colour for scrolling numbers and code which might as well have been gibberish for all Sarah could understand of them. A single point of blue light on each of the eight segments above and below flickered on, flashing intermittently before stabilising and bathing the pair in a cobalt glow.

Stumbling into view, John poked his head through the ruined wall, his eyes widening. "This doesn't look like it belongs here."

The briefest flash of lightning leapt from the emitter above Sarah's head to the pad below, forcing her son and herself to close their eyes or be blinded. A second and third tendril followed, as the computer screens that had until that moment remained off burst to life displaying calculations and system diagnostic warnings. The rumble which seemed to shake the entire shipping container grew in intensity, until Sarah wore she could feel her bones themselves vibrating in rhythm.

"I think we should get out of here," John added urgently as he extended an arm for his mother to take. A series of flashes which consumed everything in blue turning to white saw the teenager stagger backwards, rubbing his eyes and struggling to restore his vision. Starting from the computer screens furthest away to the ones closest to the rupture in the container wall, a series of green icons appeared – a tick accompanied by a stylised ZeiraCorp symbol.

The rumble grew in volume until Sarah clamped her hands over her ears, wincing at the terrible din.

Lost in the general din and brightness around, Cameron's eyes flashed with a blue glow of their own, her head cocking to the side as if instantly appraising the situation. Levering herself out of the wreckage of the equipment she had destroyed in her landing, the Terminator leaned out of the hole in the wall and thrust the hilt of her palm into John's chest – the teenager sprawling backwards and skidding along the concrete floor, coughing loudly as he gasped for breath.

No sooner had he collapsed to the floor than the outline of the shipping container blurred from the rest of the warehouse, its dimensions and structure threatening to dissipate in coruscating waves of barely contained power. A high-pitched whine joined the rumble and the deafening cacophony reached fever-pitch; crushing the senses and numbing the body. With a colossal flash light which forced John to turn his head away and throw a hand over his face, the apocalyptic show of light ended.

Conscious of the silence that had returned to the warehouse and forgetting the pain in his chest monetarily, the teenager scrambled to his feet. Bent over at the waist, he glanced up to see the shipping container as quiet and still as before they had even laid eyes upon it – minus the bodies variously dead or close to it scattered around its faded orange walls.

Of his mother and a Terminator turned protector, there was no sign save the smoke rising from the scorched emitter pads.

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**(To be continued ...)**

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	2. Chapter 2 : New Arrivals

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**DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything, including the oxygen used to fuel the fingers that typed this. FOX is my lord and master, its will be done.**

**PAIRING: Camerah, of course!**

**RATING: Some violence, adult-ish themes.**

**FEEDBACK: If you take the time read this, please take the time to let me know. **

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_She Who Dares Wins_, by A.P. Stacey.

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_Chapter II_

The chill was beyond the coldest water lapping underneath the sheets of Arctic ice that wrapped the Earth's poles; beyond being cast naked to drift through the freezing void between the stars and planets themselves. A searing cold that laid its icy touch upon her bones as if layers of flesh, muscle and soft tissue offered no barrier. There was no shape or reason to the space her body occupied – she could not tell if her eyes were open, or if there was simply nothing for them to gaze upon in the nothingness that surrounded.

There was the vaguest sense of falling as if from a great height, the only sense permeating the inky blackness that enveloped her entirely taking away her fingers, hands, arms, legs and toes though oddly enough, she did not seem to miss them. The cold permeated every facet her of being until it became the only constant in this personal purgatory; a plunging chill she held onto for comfort, even as it turned the blood in her veins to slush and ice. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the subconscious, she was aware of a a thrum beginning to build; a reverberating, rumbling growl she had heard somewhere before, though all sense of time had been lost in this strange null-prison.

The growl grew to a deafening roar and she could no more wince than press her hands to her ears.

Sarah felt the flat of her palms blaze into existence in a coruscating wave of blinding light and agonising sound, pressing them suddenly against a cold concrete floor which absorbed her slight weight where it had not existed before. She retched loudly, her damp, stringy hair falling about her features in a slick crown. Her stomach twisted and heaved, splashing the newly constituted floor with a watery mess as her shoulders hunched, breath coming in ragged gasps after each spasm of her throat.

Letting out a groan the older woman collapsed forward so her forehead – shining with a sheen of sweat – pressed into the dusty concrete, arms stretched outwards to meet in a loose clasping of the hands. Gingerly Sarah rolled on to her side, ignoring the chill that ran up her back where it pressed against the cold floor. Eyes narrowed in confusion, barely recovered from the tremendous cobalt flash that had replaced the inky blackness of the null-reality she had drifted in before, the features of a rusting ceiling slowly re-defining themselves above. Her head lolled to the side weakly, lips pursing and opening as if a fish plucked from its watery home and thrown into the tall grass.

Sarah bolted upright in realisation and almost instantly regretted it, a powerful wave of nausea and dizziness threatening to overcome her, forcing the older woman to lean back. The battle at the warehouse flashed through her consciousness, recalling the weight applied by her finger on the trigger as she shot and killed the stranger who then blew Cameron through the side of the shipping container, as if the Terminator was made of straw. Or tin.

Fighting against the urge to close her eyes, she tilted her head in a wide circle, desperately looking for something – or someone – familiar. She had the vaguest recollection of not being alone on the emitter pad before everything dissolved into inky blackness; a comforting but powerful hand that had reached back to squeeze her own even as everything she knew disappeared, removed from existence in a terrifying cacophony of blinding colour.

"Cameron?" She shouted in nothing louder than a guttural whisper, throat raw and dry. "John?"

The prickling of her flesh replayed in her mind, as the residual current of energy from the exotic weapon leapt from the jagged breach in the metal of the wall and shocked her. The noise and commotion of the complex equipment which filled the container swam through her mind, the sparks and tendrils of violent energy tearing and snapping. Shaking her head as if the simple act might clear the cobwebs, Sarah focused on her surroundings for the first time.

The room she lay in was a concrete box barely thirty feet squared; rusting support girders creating archways as they ran from the floor up against the walls to curve onto the ceiling. From the number of boxes stacked about as high as the height of the room would allow, Sarah assumed some sort of storeroom. The grimace she reserved for the vomit congealing on the concrete floor twisted to form a frown, as her eyes took in the black scorch marks radiating out to resemble a blast impact – with the older woman herself as the focal point. Were it not for the perfectly intact ceiling, Sarah might have thought she had been delivered by some great energetic fist via a strike through the concrete above her head.

"Great," She sighed aloud to no-one in particular, cradling her arms over her breasts as she concluded a jump forward or backward through the years the only possible reason for her nakedness. Without anything to prove her eyes wrong, Sarah reluctantly assumed for whatever reason Cameron and John had remained back in the past, or the future or wherever the opposite of where she found herself now was. Simply trying to understand that much was beginning to make her head hurt – though how much of the pain was actually a by-product of the jump instead, and how much was the stress of once more being separated from all she knew was difficult to say. It was difficult to do much thinking at all.

A soft thump brought Sarah's chin up sharply, eyes skipping across the wall and the crates lined up against it. Her hands balled to fists, arms tensing immediately as she climbed to her feet unsteadily, leaning against a steel support as her legs threatened to buckle underneath her. With a single arm crossed defensively over her chest in a subconscious attempt to protect some of her modesty, Sarah ignored the fluttering in her stomach and chanced a glance around a pillar of crates hiding one side of the room from view.

Sarah's eyes fell on a blast ring shared between the bottom of the wall and the floor, black scorch marks arcing outwards in a four-point star which matched the one found beneath herself. The shattered remains of a storage crate spilled splintered wood and charred supplies underneath and around the body of Cameron; the Terminator's arms spread almost parallel with the shoulders, eyes open but vacant as they stared out from a head resting cheek against blackened concrete.

Sarah rushed forwards as relief flooded her being. The prospect of loneliness, of the total isolation that threatened to engulf her beginning to subside. She moved too quickly for her legs however, which buckled and sent the older woman crashing to the ground, gasping in pain and gritting her teeth. Hand coming up to rub the back of her head, she missed an almost imperceptible hum filling the air, focused on grumbling and the slight bump growing underneath her raven locks.

The debris shifted and settled as the Terminator sat up with the slightest whine of actuators, arms returning down to place her hands on pale thighs. "Sarah?"

"Good morning," Came the soft reply. "I thought I was alone for the ride … I hope to god John isn't sitting on the other side of this room."

Cameron shook her head slightly, bringing each of her hands before her face and flexing the fingers gingerly. "I pushed him clear of the field – he didn't shift with us here."

Climbing to her feet unsteadily, Sarah leaned her weight against a crate and brushed her hair back behind an ear. Despite all the pair had gone through to date, she felt absurdly self-conscious when simply faced with the beautiful girl in all her simple, naked glory – not to mention her own simple, naked glory. Folding her arms across her chest she regarded the Terminator with a look that took in none of the alluring curves beneath her neck, instead trying to focus on the criticality of their situation. "Where exactly is here?"

She watched the Terminator wiggle her toes before raising each leg from the floor at the hip, as if expecting the limb to simply fall off her body, if she applied to much force. Apparently satisfied of her state Cameron tucked her feet underneath and pushed herself to standing, arms limply by her side in a typically traditional stance made all the more absurd by every inch of her petite form being visible under the glare of the lamps, mounted in the dusty ceiling above.

"TDEs weren't as small as the one we found, when John sent me back," The girl began. "The first prototype shouldn't be assembled for another fifteen years."

Sarah rolled her eyes, scratching at the back of her head. "I think we can safely say finding a time machine was unexpected. You haven't answered my question – where the hell are we, Cameron?"

"We're lucky to be alive," The Terminator evaded for the second time. "The TDE wasn't calibrated."

"Yeah? Well I don't feel very lucky," Sarah snapped, her hand questing down to lay against her stomach. She grimaced as her gut twisted again, stooping slightly with the pain. "Are you telling me you don't know where we are? Whether we've gone backwards or forwards?"

Cameron cocked her head to the side, her HUD's vision passing through the infra-red, thermal and other electromagnetic parts of the spectrum in an attempt to pick the slightest detail out from their drab surroundings. "I know we're not in the warehouse any more."

The older woman resisted the urge to groan, rubbing at her face with a hand. "I thought those things only moved across time, not space?"

"The TDE wasn't calibrated," The girl repeated as if that was explanation enough. Cameron did not need the advanced capabilities of her HUD to know Sarah was struggling under not only the news they were lost through time itself, but also struggling with what was happening with her son – or indeed what had happened; either left alone decades ago or at some point yet to be decided, depending on where the errant Temporal Transporter had dropped them.

There had been a point in the Terminator's past where all her runtime would have been dedicated to answering these questions immediately, where all her focus would have been directed at solving the problem in the same way a computer might resolve a programming error.

Her Chip had a different priority.

Cameron stepped forwards and in a single movement, embraced Sarah – hands meeting around the taller woman's neck and pulling the pair together into a tight hug; breasts pushing together awkwardly. The older woman opened her mouth but could think of nothing to say, her nose tickled by the brown locks of the girl's hair cascading across. Closing her eyes Sarah promised her troubles the attention they deserved in return for a few moments of peace, a few moments to enjoy the closeness. Sarah's lips grazed against the Terminator's temple, her hand cupping Cameron's head and combing the curls from the girl's tresses with her fingertips.

Easing backwards despite the Terminator's reluctance to let go, Sarah took in Cameron's features. The small smile on her lips struggling to remain in place in light of the injuries that were now plain to see – bloody metal shining and glinting in the light, where the flesh had been sheared apart or gouged from the endoskeleton beneath. "It's just skin," The girl reassured, covering the wound on her shoulder Sarah stared at with her own palm. "It'll heal."

The magic of their moment broken somewhat, Sarah fulfilled the promise made to her problems and turned her attention back to the situation at hand. Her eyes drifted down to the crate she leaned against, curiosity motivating her hands to wrap around the frame of the crate and tug at the top. A few grunts followed by a foot pressed against the wood for better leverage achieved nothing, the box staying stubbornly closed. Puffing her cheeks out in irritation, Sarah flexed her shoulders and wrists but got no further than psyching herself up for a second attempt, Cameron stepping into the conflict between wood and woman. Lithe fingertips wrapped around the edge of the lid, tearing it from the box with the snap of splintered wood and metal.

Sarah's eyes followed the shattered hatch as it spun through the air and crashed into the concrete wall, breaking apart to more resemble driftwood from a shipwreck than the impassable obstacle Sarah had faced a moment before. "Thanks," She offered weakly with an equally slight smile. Her smile lasted only the as long as it took the older woman to glance down and spy the racks of black-finish rifles, arranged side-by side and obviously lethal. Sarah frowned, reaching in and gingerly pulling one of the weapons out from its slot in the wood; feeling its considerable weight and running her eyes along its considerable length from the stock, to the discharge muzzle held inside a perforated silver-metal cage.

A smaller firing chamber – a narrower cylinder – was under slung beneath the main muzzle, resembling an added grenade launcher on the more conventional-looking weapons Sarah was familiar with. She could see a gap in the underside of the rifle's body between its forward grip and the trigger; sharp prongs emerging either side that almost resembled the space for some sort of battery, rather than visible ammunition.

"Pulse rifles," Cameron clarified as she effortlessly plucked another weapon from the crate to examine herself. The Terminator's fingertips traced an invisible line along the rifle's body, nails digging underneath an access panel and pulling it open to reveal the battle-ready, rugged innards beneath the hard-sealed plastic. "Pulse technology won't appear in a production model for eleven years after the time we left, so we must have travelled into the future."

Sarah nodded and suppressed the urge to grin at the bizarre sight of seeing the naked girl examining the weapon as if she were a cadet on a shooting range, "That narrows it down. Let's see what else our Aladdin's Cave has for us."

* * *

A half hour – plus many shredded cargo crates – later and Sarah could no longer feel the slight chill of the concrete box on her bare body, modesty once more restored by the single piece olive-green jumpsuit several sizes too big for her slight frame. Reassuringly heavy brown combat boots thumping against the concrete floor, Sarah stooped over and snatched up a rucksack stuffed with ammunition, rations, portable survival tent and a smattering of other useful goods. A few steps away, an identically dressed Cameron glanced into a freshly decapitated crate, dropping the smashed lid back onto whatever it contained that she had judged useless to them.

Feeling thoroughly reassured by being thoroughly well-armed, Sarah adjusted the straps digging into her shoulders and ruffled a hand through her raven hair, glancing at their concrete surroundings. "Some sort of survival shelter? Post-Fallout stockpile?"

The Terminator carried the considerably heavier pack on her smaller back without the slightest hint of difficulty, slinging one pulse rifle over her back and disabling the safety circuit on the one held ready in her hands. Scanning beyond the mere visual wavelengths of the Human eye, Cameron's HUD carefully examined every inch of the concrete walls she walked around. With a show of strength well within her capability, she pushed a stack of crates twice her own height across the floor, peering behind where they had stood. Her eyes did not need anything beyond the visual to see the small ladder reaching from the floor to the ceiling, rusted mounting spars driven into the walls and radiating cracks in the concrete surrounding.

The ladder itself seemed barely wide enough for both feet to share a rung together, running upwards to no obvious exit. Oblivious to the heavy load she carried and the slightest whine of the metal under the weight of the same heavy load, Cameron climbed upwards so that for the first time she could see the thinnest line of corrosion running the length of the room, just beneath where the ceiling met the wall. Faint and uneven triangles of brown painted an upside-down mountain range underneath the line where water and whatever-else had mixed.

"A ladder to nowhere," Sarah sighed, snatching up the pulse rifle she had chosen for herself from the top of the remains of a recently smashed crate. Her fingers curled inside the trigger guard and the slightest reckless thought entered her mind, the weapon's muzzle coming to bare towards a corner of the chamber and the slightest grin coming to form on her face.

Cameron had no time to suggest a better option than mindless blasting, managing no more than a scowl when a tremendous grinding sound filtered in from somewhere outside the concrete, where not even the Terminator's advanced vision could find. A powerful vibration began to course through the ladder and the walls, shaking the crates still stacked high and sending the smashed remains of the boxes that had been torn apart in the pair's earlier foraging skittering across the floor. Two sets of eyes – one closer than the other – glanced up to see the thin brown line marking the entire room begin to widen; stretching to create a gap.

The powerful rumbling tripled in volume as the sound washed into the room from outside, the slightest whiff of thick lubricant and viscous hydraulic fluid wafting across Sarah's nostrils and bringing a grimace to her face. After the gap between the retreating roof and the walls had grown to some four or five feet, the entire ceiling suddenly swung away – the rusting steel supports on a backdrop of white replaced by the distant glint of metal, pockmarked by the faint glow of daylight through skylights an impossibly high distance upwards.

Sarah's neck craned back, eyes still adjusting to the daylight glinting at the top when a dark shadow abruptly slid into view, blotting out what little light she could see. A wide circle quickly filled the space vacated by the ceiling, inset with four long grasping talons bent at the mid-joint and flexing like some giant mechanical hand twitching in anticipation of the capture. The older woman brought her pulse rifle to bear, but found the muzzle slapped away from the target by strong arms which closed around her, pushing her into the corner.

Feeling Cameron's slight body press into hers protectively, Sarah let the protest forming on her lips die to focus on what was happening above their heads. The grappler cleared the top of the walls and Sarah was able to see, with the aid of a better view, that it was only a little wider than two of the storage crate side-by-side. With a mechanical clunking it stopped its descent, sluggishly drifting left and then down to clamp upon a box with deceptive gentleness. She watched Cameron twist away and in a single fluid step to steady herself, leap up to land on the narrow circular panel which surrounded the thick bundle of cables and wires which disappeared upwards, connecting the grappler to its motive source.

"Come with me if you want to live," The Terminator whispered with a smile spread over her soft lips. Sarah rolled her eyes and scrambled upwards with less grace than Cameron had managed, wrapping a hand around the girl's waist to steady herself as both women checked their rifles and found each other's gaze. With a loud thump the grappler began to climb back upwards, swaying slightly as one motor outpaced the other momentarily. "Be ready," Cameron warned.

Sarah's eyes widened as the top of her head cleared the limit of the drab white walls surrounding, a hot breeze flapping against the folds of her clothes and whipping her hair from behind her ears. Glancing down the older woman could see the concrete box they had been trapped within was only one of six arranged in a circular formation, each massive cylinder sunk beneath a network of catwalks which crossed a warehouse of huge size. Dozens of grapplers wound their lazy way between a dozen more cylinders on screeching metal tracks, which hung from a roof over a hundred feet in the air.

She felt a small hand entwine with hers and glanced over at Cameron, squeezing it reassuringly as the Terminator led them to step down onto the very edge of the grappler's short platform. Sarah followed the bright blue gaze opposite down to the catwalk which was now a few feet beneath the rising crane and instantly understood, nodding and leaning back to gather the momentum. The pair leapt downwards to the catwalk with the thud of boot-on-steel and the squeaking of the grappler above swinging dangerously, Sarah taking a few moments longer than Cameron to absorb the impact and climb to her feet.

The Terminator set her eyes on a young man close by, garbed in an olive-green jumpsuit and matching flat-peaked cap, long before he had even finished turning his head towards the clang of their landing. Taking the barest second to ascertain he was human and not machine and that the minimum of force would be required to disable him, Cameron drove the stock of her pulse rifle into his jaw. The stranger's head snapped backwards, eyes widening reflexively in surprise as his teeth gnashed together, feet slipping out from underneath as he crashed to the catwalk back first.

Sarah recovered her senses in time to see and feel the stranger collapse to the decking unconscious. The fact the first person they had encountered on their escape had not been a Terminator did not calm the knot in the older woman's stomach like she assumed it would; the men in the warehouse they had been shifted across time from were just as human, and obviously no more trustworthy. Pushing the unsettling thoughts to the back of her mind Sarah sprinted forward behind Cameron, dispassionately watching a second man get caught in his throat by a heavy combat boot on the end of a lithe leg, clutching at his neck and gasping for breath as he sank to his knees.

By now she could hear raised voices and a number of other men – all various shapes and sizes but all dressed in the same olive-green apparel – were variously running away from them or in the case of a few brave souls, towards them. Somewhere in the rafters above their heads a warbling siren sounded; screeching and screaming its warning to anyone who would listen.

The catwalk reverberated under Sarah's feet as another two strangers met unconsciousness at the hands – and educated feet – of Cameron. The Terminator thrust her knee into the chest of a third who did not learn the painful lesson of his comrades, doubling over in time to feel the girl's thigh driven against his jaw and then feeling nothing more as he crumpled to the ground. With the hiss of steam and the screech of poorly oiled brakes, the grapplers overhead slowed to a stop as their operators fled from wherever the sat.

Despite running as quickly as they could – or as quickly as she could without leaving Sarah far behind, in the Terminator's case – the double doors which marked the apparent exist from the cavernous warehouse came closer only grudgingly as if the catwalk simply extended outwards forever. Sarah could feel her chest beginning to constrict as her heart hammered against her ribs; a combination of fatigue, the possible after-effects of their displacement through time and the general uncertainty of their situation, combining to sap the adrenaline from her veins faster than it could be produced.

The raven-haired woman gasped as she felt a heavy weight crash into her from behind, tipping her off-balance and down to the catwalk with a painful thud. Ignoring the air brutally forced from her bruised lungs, Sarah rolled onto her back in time to plant a boot on the broad chest of a worker as he lunged for the pulse rifle still limply held in her hands. The stranger grunted in pain as he fell backwards to the deck, his hand cupping his spine as he grimaced in pain. Sarah scrambled upright, a little too desperate to take advantage of the situation, as she reacted a moment too late to the man's broad leg as is it swept her own feet out from under her.

Sarah's vision swam, threatening to dissolve into stars as her head crashed against the catwalk and bounced up. Her hand was thrown outwards, fingers curling involuntarily against a hard plastic. Summoning the last vestiges of strength left in her weary body she swung the butt of the pulse rifle in an irresistible arc, smashing the weapon against flesh and bone just short of the man's temple. Head snapping to the side painfully, the stranger fell limply forwards onto Sarah until the older woman rolled him over and away.

Sucking as much air into her lungs as her chest would allow, Sarah rolled onto her stomach and up to her feet, hand resting on the guardrail for support even as she watched Cameron drive her boot into the gut of a portly worker and then drive the same foot upwards to crash against his nose; breaking the bone and painting his lips red as he tumbled backwards.

The Terminator was at her side, concern written in bright blue eyes even as the doors they headed towards burst open to slam against the warehouse walls with a resounding thud. Two sets of eyes turned to fix on the dozen dark visors which accompanied the rifle muzzles pointed in their direction. Clad in moulded armour which covered their chests, shoulders, upper arms and wrists coloured the same olive-green as their own jumpsuits, and the ones on the various unconscious or groaning bodies surrounding them on the catwalk, the newcomers fanned out with military precision.

Six stepped forward and then down to one knee, creating a triangle with a firing line clear of the six behind who remained standing in a line. Narrowing her eyes Sarah could make out the faint silver rectangle of a name badge, and the same colour of spread-winged eagle pinned to the breast armour of each. Bunches of grenades hung beside a service pistol holstered around each waist, their role and intent painfully clear.

Their role and intent was either lost on Cameron, or ignored as she raised the muzzle of her pulse rifle - slightly but enough to gain their only warning from the squad holding the door. "Drop your weapons and get down on the catwalk now! This is your only warning!"

The order had a buzzing, mechanical tone to it which might have been down to whatever vocaliser was fitted to the armoured helmets they wore, or perhaps down to the fact that it was not a person but a machine inside. Sarah felt her blood slow to a slush in her veins, fear gnawing at her insides with the possibility. Cameron cocked her head to the side, her HUD quickly identifying every member of the fire squad as human, and not Terminator. Satisfied she could disable them with only a little more force in regard to their armour she stooped over to the decking, slowly lowering her weapon to the metal and crouching down.

Without warning she pushed her heels off against the catwalk, driving herself forwards with impressive speed from a standing start. The men gathered in front did not scatter in fear or freeze in panic, their aim never wavering as the man furthest forward of the kneeling triangle squeeze the trigger of his weapon; a surging blue bolt tearing from the silver barrel to crash against the Terminator's chest and force her backwards with a crackle of coruscating lightning.

"She's metal," One of the men droned matter-of-factly to the nods of understanding of his colleagues around. Flicking a small switch midway up the body of the rifle, the same stranger as before fired; the energy wave blasting free of a smaller muzzle under slung beneath the main. Sarah swallowed the bile rising in her throat, as she realised too late what the secondary function of her rifle and the twelve that aimed her way was.

Cameron tipped forwards as the shot struck home, her powerful thighs frozen mid-stride – arms utterly still as they had pumped forwards and back for balance. Head tipped up with blue eyes fixed on their target the Terminator crashed to the floor without ever moving an actuator to soften the landing; brown hair falling lazily around the steel as if she had been carved from stone as a statue and not paralysed utterly, by the bands of bright energy which only now grounded themselves from her body, out into the decking to dissipate harmlessly.

The lead stranger flicked the same switch again and returned his rifle to primary fire, stepping forward and gently prodding Cameron with an armoured boot. Satisfied the Terminator was utterly disabled, he turned his attention back towards Sarah. "I can't disable you as easily," He said evenly. "Drop your weapon and get down on the ground or we'll do this the hard way."

Sending the pulse rifle skittering across the catwalk with a loud clap of toughened plastic on steel, Sarah reluctantly clasped her hands behind her head and dropped to her knees hesitantly. Her eyes found Cameron's; glassy and vacant and staring straight through the older woman. As a half-dozen of the men stepped over the Terminator and towards her, Sarah felt the slightest envy for the way Cameron would not even remember their surrender – the envy doubling up to a full-blown desire for emulation as she felt rough, strong hands force her head to the steel and her arms painfully behind her back.

* * *

Sarah grunted with the effort of walking in time with the two burly hands hooked underneath her restrained arms; every third or fourth step of her escorts lifting the slight woman up from the ground, so that her heavy combat boots thudded and scuffed looking for traction. She blinked the stinging sweat from her eyes, shifting her head to try and peel the cloying, claustrophobic hood which stuck to her features away from her sweaty skin. The slightest glow of harsh white light diffused through the black fabric, her nostrils flaring at the sickly, stale smell of it.

The groan of metal-on-metal, and the creak of a heavy door being pushed open echoed dully through the hood covering her ears. She grumbled in irritation as her feet stumbled into the lip of a doorway she had not expected, the burly arms virtually carrying her in mid-air simply lifting her at the biceps over it, as she flailed to find her balance again. Another screech of metal being dragged followed, as the bizarre journey from the warehouse to who-knew-where ended. Sarah found a small relief in being able to plant her feet on the floor under her own power.

The singular moment of calm was interrupted as she felt two strong hands push down on her shoulders, knees bending under heavy stress as she felt the back of a chair push up roughly between the small of her back and her cuffed arms. For a moment she fought the unseen force, her legs trembling with the effort and forcing her to suck yet more oxygen through the dusty hood which filled her mouth with stale sweat. She felt her thighs meet the chair with a soft thud as her legs gave out, a vice-like grip still pinned to her shoulders.

A third pair of footsteps reverberated against what was now obviously a metal floor, the screech of an object dragged across it causing Sarah to wince. The force applied against her shoulders disappeared instantly, the older woman involuntarily gasping as the black hood was pulled up from her face and away in a single fluid motion, forcing her eyes closed beneath the bright light they found themselves staring at.

Sarah collected the various terrible tastes in her mouth and spat them to the decking, grimacing at the taste. Stringy raven locks slick with sweat tickled her forehead and ears as she flexed her shoulders, eyes beginning to adapt from their enforced blindness. She could see the walls and ceiling as well as the floor was decking; rivets joining sheets of strong steel together now beginning to rust and warp with age. Brown stains of corrosion followed the seams, occasionally branching off to ring the cluster of pipes passing from floor to ceiling and wall across wall. Glancing up Sarah could see a simple wooden table, the top crossed with a million nicks, scratches and gouges.

"Comfortable?" A voice asked with the slightest hint of sarcasm.

The older woman followed the table up to the eyes sat opposite. A tall and broad-chested man stared straight back at her, the slightest quarter-inch of brown hair spread across his virtually bald head, extending down to dot his chin and temple with stubble. His wide jaw was set, the smallest depression beneath the ear revealing the muscles straining teeth against teeth. She noted the colour of the clothes he wore was the same olive-green as hers, but where she wore a simple one-piece jumpsuit he wore the shirt, tie, trousers, jacket and polished black boots of a military uniform.

A uniform of the United States Army.

Sarah glanced around the small room but could find no further clues that might explain where she was, or what was happening beyond the obvious. The occasional loud rumble, or thud echoed above and below disorientating her further. She scratched her head, pushing the mass of tangled hair out from her features and roughly behind her ears. Eyes squeezing closed tightly, she took a moment to calm herself and try to find an elusive centre – she had questions of her own that needed answers and if she was still alive so far, there was every chance to find them. "Where am I?"

"You're in a whole heap of trouble," The stranger replied unhelpfully, his large hands clasping together as he leaned forwards slightly. "Let's start at the beginning shall we? I'm Lieutenant Christopher Vance – who are you exactly?"

"Sarah Baum," She offered, feeling her shoulders sag slightly in relaxation and letting her mind wonder from the conversation at hand slightly, feeling the hammering in her chest subside as control reasserted itself. She recognised this as a classic interrogation and in her life Sarah had endured them beyond counting; Mental Asylums, Police Stations and a few in-between. This was nothing new save the military uniform the man wore instead of a lab coat, or a police shield.

Vance nodded and pulled an ochre-coloured folder into the middle of the desk, opening it and snatching a silver pen from his breast pocket. "That's more cooperative than I thought you might be," He mused as he tapped the pen against the desk. Tap-tap-tap. "So Sarah, let's see how easy you're going to make this for me, huh? What exactly were you doing in a U.S. Navy weapons depot?

The older woman ignored the irritating chafing of her wrists against the metal shackles, trying to bring the conversation around to reveal the information she was interested in. "What's the date?"

Vance puffed his cheeks out, sighing as he swung the pen between his fingers. Tap-tap-tap. He regarded the raven-haired woman with a hard look, as if trying to gauge whether she was simply out to waste his time and lead him circles. Sliding his cuff upwards the Lieutenant glanced at the dulled silver watch on his wrist, "It's a little after 0400 on December 2nd, in the year 2039, New Calender. What were you doing in a US Navy weapons depot?"

Sarah's mind whirled with the consequences of something as simple as a date. "Would you believe me if I said I just dropped in?" She replied half-heartedly. A million questions raced through her consciousness; Judgement Day, the rise of Skynet and the state of the wider world beyond these steel walls not the least of them. Her eyes drifted back to the Lieutenant whose expression had hardened – he was clearly finished with being reasonable.

"Let me start with what I've got here," He suggested in a tone that did not brook taking it in any way other than an order. "You broke into a US Navy weapons depot, smashing your way through an entire holding pen of supplies and picking out pulse rifles, survival equipment, rations and water purifiers. You hitched a ride on a loading crane and then proceeded to ..."

Vance turned the page, his inflection never changing from a narrative monotone. "... Attack at least five load workers leaving each unconscious and requiring medical treatment for broken noses, dislocated shoulders, broken bones and leaving at least one described as "Seriously Injured". Is that an accurate summary of events?"

Sarah flexed her lips, frustration boiling inside her as she could think of no way to phrase their innocence, to explain their mitigating circumstances despite the fact that they had indeed committed every "crime" accused of. She glanced up to see the slightest hint of satisfaction in Vance's face – as if a hunter, having lamed his quarry and now bringing his rifle up for the killing shot. "I don't want you to think you're taking the fall for this alone, Sarah ..." Tap-tap-tap.

"The Termination Unit you brought along for the ride did most of the damage."

The manacles shackling her hands together groaned slightly at the strain placed on them with the mention of Cameron, as Sarah's shoulders shook with the futile effort of pulling them apart. The Lieutenant leaned forward, his pen smacking against the tabletop repeatedly. "The thing I don't understand is why go to all that trouble – get yourself a TU, scrub it or rewire it or whatever, infiltrate a depot and then go and get yourself stuck in a storage pen. Pretty amateurish in my book; you just don't strike me as a master criminal … "

Sarah knew this game well from a time when her mental state was legally certified as insane, rather than implied. The doctors who had hounded her in their white coats, peddling their mood stabilisers and colour charts especially skilled in this art, the ability drag information from even the most reticent source via a careful mix of put-downs, praise and encouragement. Always trying to reassure a person they weren't guilty of something they fully knew they were, always trying to persuade a person black was white, the Sun was the Moon, all for the answers they wanted to hear.

"God knows this wouldn't be the first time a TU has forced someone to do something against their will … There's not a lot of the tin cans left this side of the Rocky Mountains but it probably won't be the last. Nobody's saying you orchestrated this or you planned it. Hell you'd have to be pretty fucking crazy to try and steal from the U.S. Navy, right? And if you were just plain old crazy, what would you have done with all that stolen fire-power?"

Tap-tap-tap. "Don't get me wrong Sarah," The Lieutenant continued with a thoughtful look on his chiselled face as he leant back in his chair. "I'm as much a sucker for a pretty face – I saw the TU before they hauled it downstairs and she's quite the looker. Don't think I've seen that model before but, ah, they all look like twisted scrap usually, when we're through with 'em. You familiar with Stockholm Syndrome?" Tap-tap-tap.

"It's a psychological condition," Vance continued without waiting for an answer to his rhetorical question. "The sufferer – the hostage – begins to sympathise with their kidnapper and comes to share the same views and opinions. In extreme cases the hostage can even join their kidnapper in other crimes as a weird, twisted sort of protégé.

"But I'm no psychologist," He dismissed with a hand slapped against the table, "I'm a soldier. So what do we have here? Break it down for me – are you just some crazy woman breaking into weapons depots to pass the time with your robot sidekick, looking to make a quick dollar or worse or were you strong-armed by a beautiful Termination Unit into doing its dirty work? I know which one would be the better answer for you ..."

Sarah shrugged her sore shoulders, realising there was no way to win this game. There was no better answer, only the one easiest to process through government bureaucracy recognisable anywhere irrespective of the time period. Her thoughts drifted to Cameron, forgotten for the briefest moments in the confusion of her blinded journey to this square box, to sit in front of this difficult man and somehow give him the satisfactory answers to impossible questions. What of her fate? What would happen to the Tin Miss if she were labelled the kidnapper? The responsible party?

"We travelled through time from the past," Sarah admitted finally. "We were investigating a warehouse in 2009 and accidentally activated a TDE during a fire fight. We ended up inside that storage room."

A wide grin split Vance's face, though his eyes remained narrowed and it was not difficult to see he was not in the slightest bit amused, his hands clasping together as they tucked the pen back inside the folds of his uniform jacket. "Time travel? Okay Sarah," He soothed, snatching up the folder and straightening to his full, imposing height. "We'll do this your way – the hard way."

Lieutenant Christopher Vance rapped on the thick steel door of the room, stepping back as it swung open almost immediately with a clang and a groan. Two burly men – Sarah guessed the same two had that virtually carried her here – lowered their heads to take instructions from Vance. The slightly taller of the two nodded, and pulled a familiar black hood from the pocket of his olive-green jumpsuit.

Sarah almost preferred the bitter, stale taste of her own drying sweat and the rough texture of the cloying, claustrophobic fabric as it slid roughly over her head to the interrogation at hand. At least now she was alone with her thoughts.

However dark and troubled they might be.

* * *

He felt the slight weight of the Chip in his pale palm, raising his hand upwards and down as if judging its value, lips twisted and pursed with eyes narrowed in the deepest thought. Gingerly wrapping his fingertips about the cylindrical silver base which supported the actual CPU itself – extending forward as it did to resemble a tree from which brown rectangular "leaves" branches off from the main trunk – he cocked his head to the side, his chapped lips spreading to form a grin; his fingers closing around the device to form a fist.

The chamber had once been a cavernous affair fully fifty feet squared with a high ceiling to accommodate any number of suspended loads, support columns carved into the polished silver walls themselves to leave the entire space clear and uncluttered. As it was now, the figure which made his way from one end of the large room to the other did so at a virtual crawl – his way frequently blocked by mountains of mechanical detritus spread on medical gurneys and haphazardly across the floor; a dozen beds against each wall sporting blood-stained, grease-smeared sheets which had not been changed in years, if ever. Rusting rails circled each bed above, plastic curtains hanging awkwardly with some half-closed and others torn from the ceiling to lay in a pile on the oil-stained floor. All were stained with long-dried blood and lubricants.

The junked remains of Termination Units lay on each bed with some missing their heads, others their legs at the waist. Some were mere limbs; amputated arms and legs draping over the edge of the bed as if their owners rested beside invisibly. All Units still with their skulls attached, grinned manically for the world to see save one; its entire jaw removed, so it more resembled a ventriloquist's doll too long on the stage and now broken and useless.

Still more seemed intact at first glance, but were utterly disembowelled – T-888s sitting upright as if expecting a relative to visit or a meal to be delivered; their endoskeletons gleaming save for the blackened mess of sheared wiring, burst actuators and crumpled components circled by the twisted Coltan which marked the over-eager, under-trained use of a thermal lance.

Set towards the far end of the chamber a single bed was tilted at the slightest angle towards the floor, a powerful bank of lights arranged in two concentric circles above, loops of thick cables and wiring bundles connecting it to a large section of the ceiling open bare to the structural supports above. Power conduits scarred with patches of metal applied in hasty repairs emerged from the darkness of the floor above, running towards a bank of monitors stretching dozens of feet across and mounted to the wall itself.

A dozen of the smaller screens were shattered, their sensitive innards spilling out and melted to the consoles below in a frozen waterfall of superheated and supercooled metal. The remainder were cracked but functional; the hum of their flickering screens filling the air alongside the gibberish code they scrolled. The acrid smell of burning electronics mingled with the heavy stink of hydraulic fluid, industrial lubricant, oil and the sickening aroma of flesh and blood – not so much a smell, as an after-taste that stuck to the back of the throat and made the eyes water.

The figure fell to the floor, tripping over the remains of a junked T-888 shoulder piece and sliding backwards in a pool of viscous oil. He rolled onto his back, grimacing in pain and eyes growing wide in panic as he opened his fist and inspected the Chip for fear he had crushed it in reflex or snapped it against the decking. Breathing a sigh of relief, the same grin returning to his pale, sunken features and he scrambled to his feet. He snatched up the offending piece of metal from the floor and set it down on the last gurney to his left, patting it affectionately with a scarred, gnarled hand.

He swept his eyes over her lithe form, lying prostrate on the examination table, the excitement palpable in his shining eyes and slightest tremor shaking his bony fingers. He had seen many Termination Units – more than the individual people he had met and come to dislike or disagree with over the decades of his life – but this one was so different to anything in his extensive machine experience. She was unlike the others that stood as tall as the tallest of men, broad chested with thick arms capable of ripping trees from their roots and the hardest ground. A frame of power that never quite seemed contained by the flesh that covered their gleaming innards.

He brushed a forefinger across her forehead, trailing it down her temple and cheek to the apex of her chin. He leaned downwards, so that his own sunken face – his features stretched as if pulled too tightly across his skull – was but a few inches from the glassy blue eyes that stared into ceiling and the nothingness beyond. He brushed a hand through the tresses which painted a brown halo behind her head. His eyes travelled downwards, taking in the purple leather jacket and the black tank top riven with bullet holes, so that the barest circle of pale flesh surrounded the glinting of Coltan. He gingerly pushed a fingertip into one of the shallow wounds, noting the chill of the metal.

His eyes continued, lingering over the hills of her breasts – he had never seen such attention to detail! Such replication of the woman in the machine. He longed to examine her more closely, to see just how precisely this Termination Unit replicated the female body. Hesitantly he stretched a free hand out, towards the soft inviting mounds which held his focus, motivated as it was by a nauseating mixture of science and lust.

He shook his head, pulling his hand back and scalding himself for losing sight of the task at hand. As often as he was left to his own devices, to dance a merry dance with all of this wonderful technology, within reason, he was but a cog in the machine of the United States Navy. His superiors and jailers would demand results, would demand more than his assurances of the beauty of this Termination Unit's endoskeletal covering. Whistling an obscure ditty poorly, out of tune and fading in and out of the human capacity to hear, he snatched up a pair of thick, elbow-length black rubber gloves.

He snapped them up against the opaque, creaky plastic coat which billowed from neck down to feet, dark green scrubs visible almost hanging from his gaunt, skeletal figure. He peered into the stainless steel kidney-shaped bowls arranged in a line nearby, pulling the trolley they sat on closer. Each was splattered with crimson from previous procedures barely deserving of the name. He poked a gloved finger into each, looking for the one with the driest stain. Rubbing the crusted blood between his fingertips, he nodded and dropped the Chip he had been guarding so lovingly inside. Almost as an afterthought, he pulled a stained surgical mask over his mouth and nose.

Returning his attention to the machine fashioned in the shape of a young girl on the table, he carefully pulled her towards him, before rolling her over to lie on her front. Gathering up her brown hair he carefully pulled it over the back of her head, to expose the neck. He scrutinised the various tools on display, narrowing his choice to the scalpels – searching for the cleanest blade. Each was caked in the red of old cuts and lacerations and eventually he shrugged his shoulders and simply chose the one nearest. Absent-mindedly cleaning the blade on a fold of this thick plastic coat, he drew an imaginary practice line upon the back of her neck with the forefinger of his free hand.

Beneath the stained surgical mask his grin widened, not a million miles away from resembling the twisted smile of a T-888's decapitated head which sat on the foot of a nearby gurney, watching the grisly scene.

* * *

**(To be continued ...)**

* * *


	3. Chapter 3 : Kansas

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything, including the oxygen used to fuel the fingers that typed this. FOX is my lord and master, its will be done.**

**PAIRING: Camerah, of course!**

**RATING: Some violence, adult themes.**

**FEEDBACK: If you take the time read this, please take the time to let me know. If I wrote for myself, I'd be content with just thinking out aloud. I write for the enjoyment of others. **

**AUTHOR'S COMMENTS : And some of you (And you know who you are) said it'd never happen. Well in your face, there IS a Chapter III, and you are reading it! WOOP-WOOP-WOOP-WOOP-WOOP!  
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_She Who Dares Wins, by A.P. Stacey_

_Chapter III : Looks like we're not in Kansas any more ... _

* * *

Sarah felt the bony point of her elbows press against the steel frame of the bed painfully, as she levered her aching body upwards. The mattress, barely deserving of the name, provided only an inch or two of softness to the hard metal underneath while the shifting of her bodyweight pulled the entire bed across the floor – metal screeching against metal and causing Sarah to wince.

Cupping the small of her back as if that action alone could decompress her spine, she retrieved the dented, dulled stainless steel tray sat forlornly on the floor in front of the thick slab-like door to the outside world beyond the cell. Her eyes travelled across the box that was now her unwilling home; barely ten feet squared in size with smooth metal walls broken only by the occasional line of rivets, passing from floor to ceiling. A cluster of thick pipes bunched against the top of the cell, further reducing head height over one side.

What little room there was in the tiny box was further taken up by the two skeletal beds and the recessed stainless steel bowl which passed for a toilet. Swinging limply from its mounting a single bulb provided a cone of sickly yellow light, barely enough to see the limits of the walls surrounding.

The entire cell reeked of corrosion. Rust mingling with leaking water from the pipes overhead to paint great orange patches, which slid down the walls. The swinging light above occasionally lit up patches of wetness across the floor, forming puddles in the depressions made by the legs of the bed and the weight they had bore, for who knew how many decades, before Sarah had come to lie there.

Pulling the tray into her lap as she settled back down on the paper-thin mattress, Sarah examined the somewhat congealed goo which composed her breakfast. Or Lunch. Or Dinner. Without a single window or much more than the crash of the cell door opening wide enough for her slop to be shoved through, then slamming shut three times a day, she had lost track of precisely how long it had been since her imprisonment.

Sarah pushed a finger into the pink-tinged goo, her face wrinkling in distaste as she dragged up a mound of the warm-but-never-hot paste before bringing it to her lips and hesitantly licking it. She shrugged her shoulders wearily as, predictably, it tasted precisely the same as before - a nutrient-rich protein mix which might as well have been water for all the impact it had on the palette.

Although Sarah wasn't sure exactly how long she had been stuck here, she knew better than to look for anything as civilised as a fork. Cupping her hand and scooping up some of the goo, the raven-haired woman ate her fill – which wasn't very much – as best she could while her thoughts drifted elsewhere.

A powerful ambivalence tugged at the very pit of her gut; twisting her stomach in two very different directions. On the one hand she found herself in a vision of the future that was unlike any previously experienced, suggested, foretold or warned of. Unlike the doom that seemed to await her and the rest of Humankind after Judgement Day irrespective of Sarah's best efforts, this timeline seemed to promise the most elusive of things; the goal and point of her entire quest.

Hope.

The United States Military – in some semblance of functionality – still existed. While she knew virtually nothing more than this, the fact that the Navy could not only still operate but have access to vast storehouses as well-stocked as anything pre-apocalypse seemed to indicate something had changed to weaken Skynet. Some new chain of events had formed from the fracture caused by their accidental meddling with the stuff of time travel; some new tangent which had broken the doom of Mankind, so that it was not so certain they would be crushed under a metal heel for all eternity.

Never one for books much beyond tactical training manuals and firearm repair guides, Sarah had never wanted access to a library more than now. Content to let her son manipulate the Information Superhighway to their benefit, she could not recall a time where a computer with on-line access would be more useful. This world beyond her cell promised the smallest glimmer of change but without the most basic knowledge of it, she might as well be dead.

And then there was the world she had left behind.

Sarah pressed her back against the cool metal of the wall, discarding the goo she'd had her fill of. For all the hope felt regarding the future, there was the inescapable despair of what had been left behind. If the dates supplied by the Lieutenant, who had held such little patience for the nonsense stories of time travel earlier were correct – and Sarah had no real reason to suspect they were not – her son would be in his late sixties assuming he had lived to see old age at all.

Assuming John had not been murdered at the hands of Skynet and its agents, or struck down by illness or otherwise pushed off the mortal coil then he had, at the very least, endured half a century alone without so much as a reassuring smile or a strong hand on his shoulder. Even if Derek Reese had somehow contrived to ignore his inner most wish to walk into every dangerous situation and dance with death so routinely that it had become part of his morning schedule, Sarah could not believe John's uncle would be much use in keeping the then-young man on the straight and narrow.

And yet if the future had been altered, so that Skynet no longer had dominion over the Earth, perhaps such danger was no longer a regular thing for her son. Perhaps his role as leader of the resistance had been changed – made safer. It was a blind hope without a single shred of proof or evidence to make it any more real than a mere wish, but for now it was all Sarah had to cling to. When it came to John – when it came to her only son and the only future for Mankind other than annihilation – she would take a blind wish over the likely reality.

Pulling her knees up onto the bed and to her chest, Sarah pressed her forehead down and let out a long keening sigh as her thoughts drifted to the only other person competing with her son for room in her thoughts. Absurdly she felt further from Cameron than John – for even though the former was somewhere close by, she was sure, and the latter another time line and world away she could not so easily put her mind at rest when thinking of the Terminator-turned-companion.

A sardonic smile graced Sarah's tired face as she felt what could only be loneliness gnawing at the very pit of her stomach – a feeling the older woman had long since put down and killed along with the hope for happiness, contentedness and a future. All these things were luxuries, and had no place in a war for the very survival of the Human Race which, even if won someday, would belong to the next generation to grow up without the threat of machine-induced Armageddon hanging over their heads like a planet-wide guillotine blade.

And still, there was a place for it – a place for Cameron – inside. Squeezing her eyes shut Sarah could almost recall the feel of the lithe hand as it traced patterns around her temple, skirting across the nape of her neck and down to more sensitive, engorged regions. She could feel the girl's soft lips graze hers and if she concentrated, truly recalling the moment, she could remember what it felt like to be desired by another person, so utterly and completely that their short time together could be nothing more than perfection and nothing less than bliss.

"Where are you ..." She sighed aloud to the rusting walls surrounding.

The loud clang of bolts being pulled back and the thump of locks disengaging answered, as the cell's foot-thick door swung open laboriously with the screech of badly-oiled hinges and the groan of metal twisted out from the door frame's shape. Craning her head around she came face to face with an utterly vacant pair of eyes, which no more recognised Sarah's presence than they could see the cell awaiting or their own feet.

The woman was impossibly pale – her flesh virtually translucent about the wrists, eyes and neck so that it seemed she had been painted an impossibly harsh white. There seemed no muscle definition on the skeletal arms which hung limply by their sides – simply the same pale skin pulled tightly over the bones themselves. Sarah assumed the rest of her body was equally slight but it was hidden from sight, beneath a faded green medical gown tied at the back.

"Okay Liberty," An authoritarian voice barked from out in the corridor. |A pair of gnarled black hands took hold of the woman at the shoulders and led her to the bed opposite with a mix of guidance and strategic pushing.

"Keep it buttoned, Baum," The guard warned dangerously just as Sarah had parted her lips to speak. He punctuated his warning with the end of a baton waived threateningly in her direction, his eyes narrowed as if to underline the point. Sarah's jaw set, muscles tensing as the natural reaction to wrench the baton from his grasp and do some threatening of her own became difficult to resist.

Somewhere beneath her temper, a cooler, more logical part of her consciousness dispassionately pointed out that it was unlikely a military prison employed the physically incapable as guards. It was more likely, instead, that only the toughest and most hardened fighters were chosen to guard those already trained to kill as a matter of course and that they would be more than capable of putting her down.

She nodded her understanding instead.

Satisfied, the nameless guard holstered his baton and produced a handful of red-coloured capsules from a creased plastic container. Pulling one of the woman's hands out and dropping them into the palm he closed the fingers to make a fist, and produced a canteen of water from his belt. "Take them," He ordered.

After several moments of non-action, the woman slowly – very slowly – brought the pills to her mouth, and clumsily pushed them inside. Taking the proffered canteen and a mouthful of its contents, she leaned back against the wall and resumed the near-catatonic stare at some impossibly interesting piece of the cell's ceiling.

Glancing back at Sarah as if to make sure she hadn't fashioned a club from a bed leg and was now about to stove his skull in, the guard nodded and marched smartly back into the corridor. Pausing only to haul the door closed with a thud of rusted metal against twisted metal and the ringing bang of bolts sliding into restraint holes, Sarah could only look forward to it re-opening in a few hours for dinner goo.

The raven-haired woman pushed herself back against the metal wall, running a hand through her locks and stifling a yawn. The girl opposite – for she did not seem to be much older than Cameron had been built to look like – continued her vacant staring; piquing Sarah's curiosity.

Having spent some of the most uncomfortable years of her life in a "hospital" filled to the brim of its padded cells with people like the girl opposite, Sarah had come to recognise certain conditions and psychoses – combined with the fact that they were in a military prison, the signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder seemed clear.

As did the tendency for treatment to be nothing more than maintaining their catatonic, drooling unconsciousness complete with catheters, intravenous lines and bed-turning three times a day.

It therefore came as sufficient a shock to make Sarah jump, when the woman opposite suddenly sat up and twisting her mouth in a grimace, spat out the very same pills she had so obediently taken a few minutes earlier. Licking her lips in distaste the blonde glanced upwards, regarding the older woman with a strong gaze which stood a million miles from the slack-jawed, cloudy stare of a medicated simpleton of moments before.

"They've been givin' me those pills three times a day for five years now," The stranger drawled after a few moments of staring and the accompanying uncomfortable silence. "They keep fillin' my palm and I keep spittin' 'em back up."

The southerner – as her accent instantly made obvious – leaned forwards and despite the double arm's length still between, Sarah found herself subconsciously willed to maintain the difference; tilting her head backwards slightly to restore parity. "They ain't for makin' me better – It's so obvious it'd be less so if they just up and painted it on their faces. It's Just to keep me quiet, keep me shush-shush so they don't need to be dragging me yellin' and hollerin' back and 'fore to the infirmary."

The monologue gathered momentum quickly, not waiting for Sarah to take part. "I ain't never had to share a cell since they said I was crazy, so hadn't really a choice as to what to do with the pills when I saw you there on the bunk."

Fighting the sudden dryness of her throat which verged on the painful, Sarah chastised herself for feeling even slightly insecure – the woman opposite, hiding pills underneath the tongue and feigning compliance when at all times working against the system could easily have been her, was in fact her only a few years before.

Pretending to be pliant, suggestible – nodding like a dog with its dinner waved in front of its face, Sarah had played every game they wanted her to play, given them the test results they wanted to see, all in the name of hoarding each precious scrap of individuality one could hold onto in something as ironically soul-destroying as a Mental Hospital. If anyone could be qualified to judge the truly insane surely it was her, as a woman whose life's work would make an iconic series of science-fiction films were it a work of fiction instead of being absolutely, terrifyingly real.

"What's the name?" The woman asked nonchalantly, twirling lengths of her blonde tresses about a finger.

"Baum," Sarah replied a little too quickly to be natural in her rush to avoid hesitating. In this new future, this fresh timeline many things had obviously changed for the better or if not the better, the slightly less apocalyptic. Given that the urge to allow herself to relax a little, if only to banish the creeping ache in her tense muscles was a powerful lure, Sarah fought all the harder to resist it.

"Baum huh?" The blonde asked cryptically as if considering it for truthfulness. Sarah felt her throat constrict slightly at the thought that somehow, some way, this stranger could see through a name fit to fool the United States Navy. "Like the fella who wrote 'bout the Wizard and Dorothy?"

Sarah almost puffed out her cheeks in relief and ventured a further, larger white lie; "Maybe. Don't read that much to be honest."

"Oh surely you know?" The woman replied with a scoff, throwing her arms into the air to illustrate her point. "You know, the big twister lifts the little shack right off, spins it somethin' awful, sets it down in a far off place of crazy colours and little people ..."

She swept a hand through her yellow locks. "You wonderin' about the Liberty thing? The guards started that years back – name's Isabelle Libbybaker … You can sorta' see where they come up with it, huh?

"Gotta question on my mind to be fair," She added after a moment's thought. "Since I ain't never had a cellmate I ain't never been too much worried 'bout the guards or the higher-ups findin' out about my pretendin'. Still you know now, so I have to know if I'm gonna have a problem with you. You know, for my own … sanity, funny right?"

The woman's drawl did not change in its sickly-sweet, laid-back warmth but Sarah would be an easy person to fool if she did not pick up on the subtlest of threats following the easy-going question, like an undertow beneath the waves. Part of her bristled at the insinuation, never having responded particularly well to threats – perceived or otherwise.

"It's none of my business," Sarah replied evenly in a compromise, underlining her position with a hard stare and the slightest dash of a home truth. "I don't need to go looking for any more enemies."

Isabelle's easy smile widened to form a grin, her head nodding. "Amen Baum, Amen! We're just folks tryin' to get by, right? Absolutely. We've all seen some crazy stuff right? Out in that big ol' world that's just filled with talking robots and supercomputers and people dyin' all the time. We've all seen stuff we'd give anything to scrub outta our brains like stains on a dress, right? I like the cut of your jib, Baum."

Sarah nodded, the truth in the overly enthusiastic words impossible to ignore as she spread herself out on the painfully thin mattress, which screeched with every slight movement of her equally slight weight.

"Amen," She whispered.

* * *

The scalpel clattered against the lip of the dented stainless steel sample bowl and fell inwards, bright crimson spilling from the stained blade and splashing against the dull metal sides of the container. The scalpel settled beside a half-dozen others of varying sizes with a myriad of pointed edges – some serrated, some curved but all forged for the express and gruesome purpose of slicing flesh open as easily as the air is parted by a hand cast through the wind.

The air was thick and heavy with the cloying, over-powering stink of antiseptic barely masking the tang of dried blood and fluids which hugged the floor of the chamber like a dank, dewy mist in the early morn or the late evening. Pulling stained gloves free of gnarled hands with the smack of aged leather against taut flesh, he drew in a lungful of the nauseous air and puffed out his cheeks, nodding at his work with satisfaction.

The red lines, where the pale flesh had been awkwardly pulled back together from whence it had been cut open and which snaked across the pale flesh of the Termination Unit's midsection and arms were a testament to his unique method of scientific examination. Not bound by such things as an overall defined goal, or a particularly methodical process or due care for the suffering of his "patients" he simply opened what seemed interesting – his focus rapidly switching so that were it through some perverse, ugly twist of fate that a true flesh-and-blood person took his or her place on the table, under his care they would surely have bled white through the dozens of entrance wounds.

Wherever his eyes had gone, the scalpel's blade held prone in his fingers followed. In his over-eagerness to explore he abandoned the basic tenants of good science and medical care, so that each wound made by his own hands preceding a new cut was increasingly poorly stitched closed. No mere mortal could have survived such a wandering, aimless examination and awoken to complain about it.

Clearly however, the machine fashioned in the shape of a woman before him was no mere mortal, nor the work of any mere mortal.

His eyes wandered away from the porcelain doll-like features which drew his attention so irresistibly, down towards the stainless steel sample dishes at his side of which most were filled with stained instruments and gruesome probes to the point that several overflowed and spread puddles of congealing crimson messily upon the trolley's top. His spindle-like fingertips passed over each one as he recalled with fondness the memories of each instrument's use over the many hours he had enjoyed examining.

His attention however settled on the cylindrical chip occupying the final dish to the left.

Picking it up with a reverence and care more suited to the cradling of a young child against the bosom, he ran a fingertip along its metallic edge as if somehow he felt closer to the data held upon it which frustratingly, he had no way to access. Who knows what more he could learn, what secrets were deeper than the flesh he had cut open and peered into – the secrets held within the metal underneath.

There was no way to know. No way to know under the limitations unilaterally imposed upon him. Limitations which not only harmed his desire and curiosity, but also harmed due scientific process and discovery – at least as he understood it. Closing his fist around the chip, he tapped the hand against the edge of the trolley and cast a glance towards the parted brown locks on the Termination Unit's head, which formed a soft ring around the control port for the component in question.

There were precautions which could be taken, he reasoned. Precautions that could mitigate the possibility that his examination could turn into an interrogation with himself squinting under the bright lamp of burning, mechanical eyes. Precautions that would bring this beautifully sculpted doll to life – give it back the consciousness that would allow all his desperate, yearning questions to be answered in as much detail as he desired.

A personal repository of information which would be his and his alone. The discovery and the curiosity went beyond inviting and merely intriguing. It was intoxicating.

His mind made up, he held the delicate component by the tips of his fingers and lay his free hand across the soft brown locks to give him the stability to bring the former towards the latter. With deftness not much in evidence during his cutting and slicing he guided the chip downwards until it was held alone by the snugness of its access port. Gingerly removing his fingertips and nodding in satisfaction, he turned his attention to the precautions required with a palpable excitement that gave him a visible spring to his step.

* * *

The process of simply waking up was a complex biological process with a massive number of permutations based on seemingly random conditions. Some might sit up suddenly, their chests glistening with a sheen of sweat as they sucked great lungfuls of air through slack mouths and squeezed watering eyes open and shut.

Still, some woke gradually – a gentle transition from sleep to a warm, sluggish rest and then finally the slightest crack of a coloured iris appearing underneath the eyelid to signal the start of a new day; the stretch of weary limbs followed by the softest sigh of consciousness.

Others found their waking routine between the extremes and always changing. Such was the virtually impenetrable mystery of the Human Brain and sentience which had always eluded the science created by Man himself to better understand. Better understand the cleverness, the emotion, the cognitive genius that allowed for a person to grasp the concept that he or she did not truly understood how to think, only that they could think.

A machine operates on exact principles and dimensions which never change. In order for the system to go live every single component must be operating within precise tolerances which can never be wavered or ignored. Unlike the living, breathing biology of natural life there can never be any "give" to a system which by its very definition is rigid and is as much empowered as it is held back by its limitations.

When the components of the greater machine fall from these strict, ironclad tolerances the system as a whole fails instantaneously. There is no slow descent into mumbling incoherency or gibberish, child-like repetition. There are no prolonged death throes or thrashing – the system simply ceases to function and with the sometimes literal flick of a switch is reduced to the mere sum of its parts.

As the power supplied by the nuclear battery buried underneath her Coltan-forged breast plate shunted the incredible energies of the split atom to high-gain capacitors, arranged in a concentric circle around the battery, the mere components and parts which alone were trinkets and idle conversation for a lunchtime quickly conspired to become a greater, more wonderful whole.

Forty eight seconds were required for the capacitors to receive sufficient charge from the nuclear battery to fire.

Hardware spun up to speed and released the Software contained within; diagnostic programs springing to life and scrutinising every hard-wired circuit and connection path five times over in a little less than the time required for the blink of an eye.

A one hundredth of a second was required for the diagnostic systems to confirm secondary system readiness.

The secondary system was as close to a Human subconscious as a machine could ever hope – or truly need – to possess. While it was responsible for collating, interpreting and responding to the results of diagnostics by use of auto-repair and re-routing subsystems its primary purpose was as the ultimate guardian of the primary system – better known as the Central Processing Unit, CPU, or simply the "Chip".

At the very pinnacle of processing technology it stood as the sum total of a very different form of conscious life; barely larger than an index finger yet containing sufficient computing power that to have hypothetically duplicated it a decade before might have required a thousand homes' worth of server farms and a thousand kilometres of snaking network cables.

As befitting such an incredible (and fragile) piece of technology the most stringent circumstances would have to be met before the secondary system would release authority for a primary system boot-up. Like the Royal Guard armoured in gleaming steel, razor-sharp blades held ready to cut down the foolish or unwary they roamed far ahead of their protective charge safely cocooned within a horse-drawn carriage of sorts.

Only once the road was clear and the path secure would the procession move forward and the royalty in question finally be allowed to step outside and feel the wind on her face.

Seventy one seconds were taken for the secondary system to be satisfied – as only the flawless perfection of a machine can demand – that every component was operating within tolerance. Without the fanfare it truly deserved the primary system booted and the complex series of machines interacting with each other took a collective step beyond cooperation – becoming a fully fledged life of sorts.

Lacking the mental fog which often accompanied waking up, a computer was able to instantly recall the data it had recorded before shut-down; whether that record had been made a moment or a year beforehand. Everything experienced could be replayed frame-by-frame leading up to whatever incident had caused a component, or ten, to fall out of tolerance and bring the greater machine to a grinding halt.

It took five one-hundredths of a second for Cameron to recall being displaced from the warehouse where they had ventured in the following of a lead. Five one-hundredths of a second to recall the reassurance in seeing Sarah's face as the older woman had emerged between the crates and the storage racks and knowing that she would be allowed to continue protecting her.

Five one-hundredths of a second to remember she loved her as only a person could love another person; even if one of the pair was made of metal.

The remaining four one-hundredths of a second which completed the one hundred and twenty second overall reboot were spent reviewing the escape from the storage bay – prematurely ended after several strangers had been upended and dispatched, and she herself had been disabled at the hands of a military squad armed with exotic weapons.

Cameron's cobalt eyes snapped open and instantly focused on a leering, hook-nosed face almost touching her own.

"Are you on-line?" The stranger asked as if he were speaking to a child, the sound of latex snapping together as he clapped his glove hands together. It was all he could do to keep a handle on his excitement as he marvelled at the machine which had come to life before him. His eyes wondered over its exceptionally alluring figure, his lips pursing in approval.

He snatched up a well-chewed, broken pencil and balanced a dog-eared notepad against his thigh. His scribblings matched the speed of his fevered thoughts as he hurried to consign his observations to some semi-permanent medium rather than run the risk of forgetting some vital detail in his excitement.

"You breathe!" He exclaimed with surprise, gesturing with a latex fingertip towards Cameron's chest as it rose and fell. "Well, you pretend to breathe but extraordinary nonetheless! And your skin!"

Reaching across he traced an inappropriate line from one of the freshly sutured wounds of his own design up to the small of Cameron's elbow, rubbing the perspiration between his fingertips as if it were tinged with gold or platinum. "You sweat! Extraordinary! I've never seen anything like this!"

While from the outside-in, Cameron appeared to be a small and shivering girl the inside-out was an altogether far more calculating affair. Within the barest fraction of a second her Chip had collated all the information available and extracted several likelihoods and quasi-facts from which to base responses.

The endoskeletons in varying states of destruction surrounding her immediately identified whatever facility this was, as one with extensive knowledge of Skynet or the agents of Skynet. The fresh wounds on her flesh indicated a deep-body examination which would have undoubtedly revealed her nature as machine rather than human. These facts were sufficient to remove the option to attempt to use infiltration as a method of escape – there was now no way to hide what she was, irrespective of how well she pretended to cry, or beg for mercy.

Additionally, the secondary "clock" of sorts within her Chip was keeping time over three days behind the same secondary clock located elsewhere in her skull-section. This discrepancy could only be explained by removal of her Chip and its re-insertion several days later. Making a leap of logic that the same person responsible for its removal and refitting was the same person before her, it seemed likely the stranger therefore had at least a rudimentary understanding of Skynet-based technology and systems.

Sarah had now been alone for seventy seven hours precisely by her calculations – seventy seven hours too long in Cameron's ironclad opinion. Her options were therefore reduced to brute force, after she had extracted what useful information she could about exactly where – or more importantly when – she was.

Disengaging the speech filter from her voice box to leave the scratchy, somewhat science-fiction stereotype of a robot's monotone, Cameron tested the restraining straps binding her arms and legs to the gurney without ever breaking eye-contact with the stranger. "Awaiting Instruction."

He frowned, the well-worn edge of his pencil finding its way between his teeth. "Where and when were you built?"

"Awaiting Instruction," Cameron buzzed loudly.

He cocked his head to the side, the slightest disappointment beginning to dampen his initial enthusiasm. "What're your mission objectives?"

Cameron repeated the same droning mantra as if she had not heard the question at all. "Awaiting Instruction."

The stranger slumped back in his chair, scratching at the top of his head with the end of his pencil. Blinded slightly by the excitement of the find he had failed to consider that this Termination Unit might not function perfectly as all other recovered examples had before. He had not considered that perhaps the very reason this incredibly rare specimen had appeared at all was because somehow, it was defective.

"How did you get into the United States?" He asked hopefully, as if somehow the machine might suddenly become cooperate. "Awaiting Instruction," was his only answer.

He puffed out his cheeks, shrugging his shoulders slightly. Even if this Termination Unit was a loss operationally there was still an incredible amount to learn about its strange, almost futuristic technologies. There was enough mystery regarding its inner workings to keep him busy in disassembly and examination for years to come. Setting his notepad and pencil down and climbing to his feet, he made his way over to the gurney and pulled a pair of pliers from his coat pocket.

He got no further than reaching out to push back the mass of brown locks obscuring the access port for the CPU.

Cameron easily sheared the arm restraints apart – so easily that her left arm was able to continue upwards to curl its lithe fingertips about the stranger's neck and send him backwards with such force that his toes, pointed fully down with the heel back, did not come within a foot of the ground until he crashed into the wall opposite.

The clattering of endoskeletal parts reverberated through the chamber as the stranger slumped into the headless torso of a junked T-888 – or what Cameron assumed was a T-888. As she swung her legs over the end of the gurney and stepped off to close on him, numerous error messages scrolled across her HUD as she conducted a passing scan of the endoskeleton. There were several glaring inconsistencies in the construction and composition of the unit – from the poorer alloy of Coltan used in its construction, to the considerably more limited learning computer, or what was left of the learning computer poking through sections of the skull arbitrarily torn open with a badly aimed thermal lance.

The stranger clutched the back of his head, groaning and doing little else and thereby giving Cameron a little more time to direct her attention to some of the closest Terminators which, bizarrely, all showed examples of inferior construction techniques and technologies.

Effortlessly pulling the stranger first to his feet and then up into the air by the scruff of his collar, Cameron reconnected her speech filter and made herself considerably more intelligible. "What is your name?"

"Van Der Meder, Eliot" The man stuttered between spluttering breaths as he struggled pointlessly. "Doctor, United States Air Force ..."

"What is this facility?" The petite Terminator continued. De Meder continued his struggling, his eyes darting around the chamber as if one of hundreds of junked machines picked apart by his hands might choose now to return to cybernetic life and assist their keeper. Dead lenses and permanently-locked maniacal grins made no effort to help.

"Van Der Meder, Eliot – Doctor, United States Air Force … Serial number USAF-91101--"

Cameron applied her free hand and its fingers around the apparent Doctor's throat, squeezing until she felt his airway begin to pulse with the effort of forcing oxygen into his lungs below. "What is this facility? Is it military in function?"

It was obvious to both Cameron and the struggling man that he was no soldier and apparently content to have at least made a nod to official procedure and desperate still for a little more air in his chest, Der Meder struggled to make his voice clearer. "Hampton Roads ..." He wheezed.

A frown marred Cameron's features as she processed the implications of the news – that the temporal displacement had carried them from the Western Seaboard to the Eastern, and straight into the heart of the home of the United States Navy on the Atlantic coast. This single answer raised multiple questions, all of which could now be answered at her leisure.

Her grip loosened slightly, "What is the date?"

"December fifth ..." He choked. "2039 New Calender ..."

Cameron lowered Der Meder so that the very tips of his toes grazed the stained floor. Happy enough to feel anything solid beneath his feet the Doctor ceased his distracting fidgeting and instead concentrated on balancing on the very end of his shoes. "New Calender?"

It was the Doctor's turn to frown as he looked at the Terminator as if she had snatched up one of the severed heads lying at her feet and bolted it to her frame. The increasing pressure on his throat however focused his mind wonderfully; "The New Calender after the Federal Government was re-established ..."

"Re-established after what?" She demanded quickly.

"The Third World War," Eliot replied in a ragged whisper as if he were stating the most obvious fact that could be recalled to him. While Cameron had physical control of the situation it was obvious she knew almost nothing about this strange new tangent of the future – where some event had occurred, or failed to occur, after their original departure to change things.

Of course perhaps this was simply the Apocalypse she had originally been designed to finish but reprogrammed by John to prevent in another guise, with a new name. "Judgement Day?"

"Judgement Day?" Der Meder repeated in confusion, clearly having no understanding of what the mechanical girl could possibly mean beyond perhaps asking of him a rhetorical question he did not really want to answer.

Cameron had sufficient questions to keep the good Doctor occupied for many hours more but was interrupted by the loud clang of a heavy bulkhead door opening. Snapping her neck around as it swung open with the creak of rusting hinges oiled too sparingly, and calculating there to be no time to take up a more stealthy position the Terminator cast De Meder through the air to land upon his own operating table with a casualness which belied the massive strength required.

The new arrival was far taller than the good Doctor standing at least six feet. Where Der Meder's physique had been wiry and thin the new stranger had a broad chest and well-defined anchoring tendons between the shoulders and the neck. He wore the olive-green greatcoat of the United States Army, hands invisible within brown leather gloves and only the slightest trace of brown curls peeking out beneath the rim of an officer's cap.

Slate grey eyes stared out from a weathered face, framed by stubble reaching down from the ears around the chin. Slate grey eyes which took in Cameron, the twitching legs of Der Meder behind the upturned surgical table and still made no obvious move further than to seal the door closed with, the sole of his boot thrust behind.

Cameron's dermal sensors registered the pain of the officer's eventual move even as she began to run towards him. Bullets grazed and nicked and sloughed the flesh from her endoskeleton as the pistol discharged round after round which found their mark with expert marksmanship. Skill with a weapon or not the bullets lacked stopping power and her progress towards her target was unhindered.

Cameron drew back her arm to backhand the officer with sufficient force to, in all likelihood, send him back through the hatch from whence he came. It came as no small shock that it was her HUD instead which registered a tremendous kinetic impact, which took her from her feet and into the ceiling support column some fifty feet back with the crash of shattered concrete and the groan bending steel.

The compact Terminator was on her feet almost immediately, assuming she had simply encountered another machine and would therefore have to adapt accordingly. It was therefore the second shock of as many seconds when she could detect nothing but the normal physiological outputs of a human body where an endoskeleton should be. Other than what appeared to be body armour underneath his greatcoat, the officer was as human as the Doctor she had dispatched with ease earlier.

Cameron doubled over as a hard boot to her gut forced the servomotors in the base of her spine to over-extend, the front of her head driven into the support pillar courtesy of a well applied elbow drilled into the small of her back before she could recover. Craning her neck around to acquire her target, she instead acquired the closed fist of the officer as it crashed into her temple with a force well beyond the capacity of the human body to deliver.

Numerous red lines flashed before her HUD as her secondary system set about re-routing damage and maintaining the prerequisites for higher Chip function. The scream of bending metal assaulted her auditory processor, as a band of steel several inches thick descended over her head and against her chest. Angling her body forward she fought with the combined strength of her servomotors, actuators and motivators to resist the force pulling her back towards the pillar.

A flurry of blows, each as devastating as the uppercut of a T-888 reigned down on the back of Cameron's neck, the third and fourth producing a flickering which disrupted her HUD and reduced everything on-screen to blackness. With each repeated strike she lost ground towards the pillar, as her gyroscopic stabilisers were forced to turn their attention to lessening the impact on her spinal shaft rather than maintaining her footing.

Cameron felt the cold chill of the concrete up against the exposed flesh of her back – where her surgical gown had been torn so easily away – as the steel around her waist drew her as far back as she could go. A flash of dark green followed and a powerful boot drove its heel into the band, which in turn drove the giant horseshoe-shaped piece into the pillar itself. Once, twice and a third time the impact made the pressure between the Terminator's waist and the steel ever more snug.

On the fourth strike her arms were pinned so completely that her effective resistance was over. The fifth and sixth impact of the boot cut into her flesh and stained the steel red while the seventh – and final – strike pushed the steel into contact with the very bottom of her Coltan breast plate.

Slate grey eyes fixed on cobalt blue orbs with a contempt that was not disguised. Tugging at the base of the brown leather gloves he still wore, the officer's voice barked loudly through the chamber.

"Der Meder …" He began, turning his back to Cameron to deny her the privilege of face-to-face conversation. "Turn that thing off immediately."

* * *

To Be Continued …


	4. Chapter 4 : Stuck In A Moment

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything, including the oxygen used to fuel the fingers that typed this. FOX is my lord and master, its will be done.**

**PAIRING: Camerah, of course!**

**RATING: Some violence, adult themes.**

**FEEDBACK: If you take the time read this, please take the time to let me know. If I wrote for myself, I'd be content with just thinking out aloud. I write for the enjoyment of others. **

**AUTHOR'S COMMENTS : Two chapters in one calender month? Better look outside and see if the Four Horsemen are galloping past your house ...**

* * *

_She Who Dares Wins, by A.P. Stacey_

_Chapter IV : And if your way should falter ..._

* * *

"What the fuck do you think you're looking at, Baum? Something wrong with your neck?" A voice hissed, dripping with disdain and the obvious threat of violence. The clanking of heavy boots on metal slowed to a tapping and them stopped completely, as the line of marching, faceless, inmates all came to a halt to observe the coming spectacle most had endured before at least once. Or twice. Or more.

Sarah has known what was coming a split-second after failing to catch her gaze wondering. It had seemed like hours since their group had been gathered from their cells and practically frog-marched through an apparently endless maze of corridors, so claustrophobic one could frequently stand on their tip-toes to press their foreheads against the rim of the next door.

It had taken only the barest moment for Sarah to become completely lost – each section looked precisely like the last and turned out to be precisely the same as the next. Rusting steel walls were stained orange and brown – the rust pockmarking and rutting the surface in some places, while eating through in others to leave nothing but oxides no stronger than sand in its place.

Clusters of pipes ran overhead, following the direction of every turn. Most dripped their contents on top of bowed heads which, as Sarah's luck would have it, so far contained nothing more offensive than water.

Her luck had apparently run out shortly after this small piece of good fortune. An idle mind being the Devil's playground, her eyes had wondered and committed the cardinal sin of finding the accompanying prison guard whose own gaze was searching for the first person foolish enough to challenge him. From the way the prisoner immediately in front and behind recoiled in expectation, Sarah could deduce she would find out the hard way.

"Something wrong with your ears, Baum?" He grunted, stepping forward and slapping the end of the baton he held in one hand against his free palm. Standing at over six feet in height it was not difficult to imagine why the imposing guard had wound up in the Prison Service; powerful arms framing a broad chest from above which a chiselled jaw jutted outwards, underneath two blazing eyes which might as well have been firing live ammunition for all the compassion they showed.

Sarah was no newcomer to the roles and subtle power-plays of an institution like prison. Stereotypes seen in film and dramas were nonetheless based on real-life repetition; there was the misunderstood prisoner, the unbalanced and the absolutely guilty. There were the wrongly charged and the mitigating circumstances.

This extended to the staff – the guard trying to keep his head down and nothing more; the guard trying to retain his morality and his job. And the man stood before her – the thug and the dictator who viewed his charges as nothing more than excrement to be cleaned from the sole of his boot. Unfortunately with the latter there was precious little that could be done to avoid the likelihood of a split lip and a throbbing headache.

Being rather keen on seeing both John and Cameron again, Sarah had no real desire to stand her ground and die for the sake of offending a brutish, stone-age thug who knew full well that he held every card in the deck and operated from a position of total authority.

"Nothing's wrong," She replied finally, neutrally. His eyes narrowed as he leaned closer, gesturing to his collar with the end of the baton. "See these, Baum? Do you know what these are?"

"Lieutenant bars," She answered with the slightest sigh, realising the circle was complete and there would be no real way to avoid what was coming next. The guard nodded, his lips spreading in the thinnest smile as he straightened, as if pleased with the deduction. "That's some real good work for a civvie, Baum ..."

Sarah doubled over as the end of the baton was thrust hard against her stomach, stifling the gasp so as not to give him the pleasure of hearing it as she sank down to one knee. Pain radiated through her gut as she struggled to suck a lungful of air into her chest, fingers splaying out on the damp metal floor to support her slight weight.

Holstering the baton and straightening an imagined crookedness of his service tie, the guard tugged at non-existent creases on the thighs of his impeccably pressed trousers and lowered himself to eye-level with Sarah. Grabbing a fistful of hair, he forced her head upwards. "Let's try that again. Is there something wrong with your hearing, Baum?"

"Nothing wrong, sir," She managed through gritted teeth. She squeezed her eyes shut as she felt a powerful hand thrust her backwards by the top of the scalp, so that the back of her head crashed against the wall and sent her sliding to the floor proper.

The guard climbed back to his feet, "Better, Baum – we're almost there. Is there something wrong with your neck?"

Sarah shook her head – as much to work out the kink as to emphasise no. "Nothing wrong with my neck, sir."

"Then keep your eyes where they belong, in front of your fucking face," He ordered. "On your feet and fall back into line."

Recognising the sole chance to end the entire sorry affair, she planted both hands on the wall and scrambled up to one knee, head still ringing slightly so that she swayed without a centre of balance. A pair of guiding hands took a firm hold underneath her armpits, helping Sarah up until she could stand under her own power.

"Don't worry 'bout it Baum, you gotta' hard head on those shoulders," A familiar drawl soothed. "We've all been given' a lickin' or two. Wouldn't be prison otherwise, right honey?"

Managing a small smile as she cradled the back of her sore head, Sarah nodded at Liberty and fell back into line behind.

* * *

Sarah used the throbbing in her skull to keep her attention focused entirely on the rest of the journey to who-knew-where. She alternated between soothing the bump forming underneath her hair, counting the fire extinguishers which were missing their firing handles and were therefore useless and following the patterns of rust on the wall as they walked.

Occasionally the barking orders of the guard who had menaced her earlier would break her concentration but wiser, if not necessarily smarter, Sarah always made sure to keep her eyes glued to the floor.

More than once, she swore she felt the guard's eyes on her as he delivered a beating to another unlucky inmate – almost as if he were challenging her to stand up to him even when his attention was drawn, originally, by someone else.

Counting fire extinguishers, avoiding angry guards and soothing bumps were altogether forgotten as they rounded an unremarkable, rusting corridor having climbed an unremarkable, rusting stairwell. While her eyes saw nothing more exciting than another steep staircase climbing upwards out of sight, her nostrils flared and her flesh grew goosebumps as a rolling blast of fresh air washed over and through the corridor.

The sting of salt made Sarah's eyes water but she fought the urge to shut them – instead savouring the simple pleasure of a fresh breeze, after what had seemed like weeks locked in a metal box without end. As the line advanced forwards and began to climb the staircase, the breeze grew ever-stronger until her hair was lifted from her shoulders, as the hatchway above came into view.

As she stepped through the hatch all the salt in the world could not have forced her eyes to close. Ahead of her there were no more winding corridors or repetitive staircases or open hatches. Instead the superstructure they had trekked through for what had seemed like hours disappeared – replaced instead by an expansive, flat decking which stretched for hundreds of feet to the sides and a thousand feet ahead.

A perimeter fence of steel and meshing standing three times as tall as a man ran around the entire perimeter of the decking, topped with coils of rusting, though still razor-sharp barbed wiring. A number of towers climbed high into the sky on corroded trussing, from which powerful spotlights stood idle – waiting for the sun to set. Glancing through the perimeter fencing to her left, the lapping blue water which extended for as far as one could see to the horizon and beyond, helped Sarah to finally understand exactly where she was.

Craning her neck back to confirm it, her eyes followed the superstructure upwards – a metal island sprouting a dozen smaller towers, arms, communication mounts and radar attachment points. Massive exhaust funnels leaned outwards from the island, their discharge ports scorched by the sooty smoke of decades of work. Emblazoned across the front of the island proudly, if somewhat faded by exposure to the elements and the change in its role, Sarah read aloud a venerable name from history supposedly past.

**U.S.S. KITTY HAWK CV-63 **

The flight deck – originally designed for the acceleration of aircraft like the F-18 Super Hornet weighing upwards of thirty thousand pounds at speeds in excess of a hundred and sixty miles per hour, had been modified for more mundane operations. Rows of simple metal benches three-deep stretched alongside either sides of the flight deck; between which a basketball court, marked out sloppily with white paint, a series of weights apparently constructed from flywheels and axles and any number of minimal-cost diversions stood.

Finally free to break away from the shuffling line and walk at her own pace, Sarah gorged her eyes on the feast of things to see which did not involve the same four rusting walls apparently repeated a thousand times below-decks. The very slightest smile crossed her face, as she felt the last drizzle of sea spray from a breaking wave carried on the wind from below dampen her features. Glancing up at the gloomy grey sky, Sarah was nonetheless grateful to see it.

Crossing over to one of the benches and taking a seat, she saw the dichotomy present by simply looking ahead and backwards. Out to the port side of the Kitty Hawk the Atlantic Ocean stretched and rolled and raged with a power which had been balanced, but never truly tamed by the very ship Sarah now involuntarily called her home, for decades before she had even been born.

There was nothing beyond the blue of the sea and the grey of the sky.

To the starboard side the industry of man was as productive as it was unpleasant to look at. A blanket of metal – warehouses, offices, laboratories, apartment complexes and refineries formed an artificial mesh which lay over the ground, granting only the very occasional glimpse of green. A thick miasma of smoke drifted lazily from chimneys both on rooftops and standing a hundred feet in the air. The by-products of progress were belched directly into the overcast sky.

It was nonetheless the most beautiful thing Sarah could have ever hoped to see in any possible future. Even from where she sat – a criminal on a floating prison – she was at once the richest of all the peoples of this Future-Earth. She had seen the doom of Mankind waiting in the shadows of the present-now-left-behind; Sarah had seen the agent of the apocalypse hiding behind progress and technology and working incessantly, without rest or pause, to wrap a metal noose around Humanity's collective neck.

If Skynet were still here, it had ultimately failed in its distinctly-alien desire to exterminate Humanity. Regardless of what happened to her personally, Sarah considered that the sweetest victory she could ever hope to experience or achieve.

"That ain't good enough retard!" A voice bellowed so loudly that Sarah was forced to wince and turn her head away. Glancing up from her monologue, she did not recognise any of the three women gathered in a triangle around a fourth. Craning her neck, she struggled to catch the face of the fourth until the owner of the powerful voice stepped aside to reveal Sarah's unusual cellmate.

"I ain't got none," Liberty pleaded. "Doctor says I ain't s'posed to take it what with my medications and such."

"Bullshit!" The second stranger shouted, grabbing Liberty by the throat and pulling her closer. "Everyone knows you retards got your hands in the pharmacy cupboards 'soon as the Doc's back's turned around. We ain't asking for your fucking firstborn, retard. We just wanted a litle 'Bliss and a little Wipeout. Hand it over."

"Is there a problem?" Sarah asked rather lamely, having strode over to the group with irritation in her features and a practised talent for interfering in affairs that didn't involve her. More used to opening her exchanges with fists rather than words, she was a little unprepared for conversation.

The stranger holding Liberty by the throat turned her attention towards Sarah, a deep scowl creasing flesh obviously torn open and stitched back closed several times over. " 'The fuck do you want? This don't concern you."

"She's my cellmate," Sarah replied simply as if that were justification enough. "I don't need her bleeding all over my floor."

As if to illustrate her point she stepped forward, eyes narrowing and fingers balling into fists. The stranger holding Liberty did not budge or recoil – the eyes which replied to Sarah's stare had seen too much violence to be intimidated so easily. Nonetheless the women opposite knew by Sarah's demeanour and stance that she would not simply take leave without encouragement.

Sarah saw the blade before the second stranger had finished extending her elbow outwards. Rolling backwards she clamped her own hands around the outstretched limb, allowing gravity to pull her towards the decking along with the attacker. Caught off balance the knife-wielder was flipped over – landing on her back with a loud thud of flesh against metal.

Pausing only for a moment to allow her body to absorb the impact Sarah span her outstretched leg around, kicking the third woman's feet out from underneath her so that she crashed down to the ground with flailing arms and a cry of surprise on her lips. Snatching up the loose blade – a piece of metal sharpened to a murderous point – Sarah eyed the ringleader and wordlessly challenged her to continue the fight.

"It's only a retard," The scarred woman shrugged, shoving Liberty down to the flight deck-turned basketball court. "You win this one."

Variously nursing bruised backs, backsides and egos the trio slinked off towards the benches on the far side of the flight deck. Sarah puffed her cheeks out, as she helped Liberty back to her feet. From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a military-issue baton and uniform and for a moment, despair filled her as she turned her head to search for Lieutenant bars.

"We got a problem here, Baum?" The guard asked. Sarah's shoulders slumped in relief as she saw only the shoulder arrows of a sergeant; the same man who had first "introduced" Sarah to her cellmate. "No problem, sir."

Holstering his baton, the Sergeant shook his head ruefully. "You don't need no sir, Baum. You ain't in the military. Guardsman is official enough. One thing though, Baum ..."

Although they stood alone underneath one of the basketball hoops, the guard's voice dropped to a whisper barely audible over the crash of the waves against the Aircraft Carrier's hull, the laughing and arguing of the other prisoners and the din of industry on the shore.

"It's best to sort out your problems below-decks, Baum. Away from our eyes – some of us get our kicks 'outta giving you kicks, if you catch my meaning. You ain't ever going to win so don't even try. Just don't give them a reason."

Sarah nodded gratefully as the sergeant turned and resumed his patrol. Suddenly becoming conscious of a thousand staring eyes, she subconsciously hugged at her elbows and gestured her head towards the hatchway; eyes on Liberty. "I think I've had my fill of the sea for today."

* * *

Colonel Stephen Lavenrunz removed the officer's cap from his head and tucked it underneath his armpit as he surveyed the chamber of horrors which surrounded him – nose wrinkling in distaste as he came to stop in front of a bench running alongside an examination table. He bent over to examine the various vials, containers, sample jars and specimen tubes.

Still somewhat winded from his earlier experience the "good" Doctor, one Eliot Van Der Meder, stopped at the corner of the bench to catch his breath. Coughing and spluttering he perched himself on the edge, wringing his hands nervously and never allowing his eyes to stray from the officer looking increasingly displeased on the opposite side.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," The Colonel recited, apparently to himself, without ever taking his eyes off the bench. Picking up a jar he examined the thick, congealed red liquid inside with obvious distaste on his stone-coloured features. "Remind me, Doctor, why you're here."

"It was all a very frightful misunderstanding Colonel," Eliot began pathetically. "I was carrying out some research in addition to my very demanding duties at AFMS--"

"The United States Air Force Medical Service?" Lavenrunz interrupted, before the Doctor nodded. The Colonel set the jar back down on the bench, turning his full attention to Van Der Meder who immediately began to wither under the glare. "The Cybernetic Countermeasures Corps?"

Eliot fidgeted, beginning and ending his reply with noises and half-words as if trying to work out a new way to tell a story he had already told a hundred times. Lavenrunz's eyes did not waiver from their opposite number, "Your service record certainly carries your department as Cybernetic Countermeasures. Attached to the 8th Army Infantry – The Fighting Eagles, deployed in north-west Colorado just short of the Red Line. Your service record carries that because, if you recall, you edited it to make sure."

"If memory serves me right," The Colonel continued, although he had long since memorised the incident so as to make sure every detail was correct whenever it was retold, "You were indeed deployed there. You were indeed attached to The Fighting Eagles. The only discrepancy being you were seconded from the Medical Corps, not the Cybercorps. You were there to treat the fighting men and women of Colorado ..."

The Colonel set his officer's cap back on his head, tugging at the peaked visor. "You're here because you were more interested in mechanical men than the flesh-and-blood comrades you swore to treat. You're here because even after your request to make your perverse hobby a career was rejected – on the just grounds that we needed the U.S. Army's doctors to treat the U.S. Army – you went ahead and overrode Lieutenant and Brigadier-Generals with decades of seniority over yourself and simply edited your own service record.

"What you did was tantamount to treason at the very worst if it cost any fighting men and women their lives, and gross insubordination and wilful disobeying of orders at the very least. Seeing as you spent, what, almost fifteen months in your own private laboratory and fantasy world provided by a respected Major who you took for a fool and treated as such, you're probably culpable for murder …

"Did you really think they wouldn't find what you'd been spending months of your every waking moment on? All those learning computers salvaged from dozens of Termination Units you reported as being melted down – expressively forbidden from being retained because of people like you – networked together, like you didn't learn a thing from the Skynet incident and the world war we're still fighting. The only comfort I can draw from the whole sorry affair is that you never had the intellect required to bring it to life properly."

"Major Daniels died?" The Doctor managed between staring at the floor and furtive, almost pleading glances up at his superior officer.

"Don't look at me like you don't know," Lavenrunz warned with an icy tone. "Major Daniels killed himself two weeks after the Board of Inquiry recommending his demotion and reassignment away from the Red Line. You constructed a web of lies and falsehoods and used the good faith of an honest military man to underpin your entire operation. As far as I'm concerned, it was your hand that slipped the noose around Daniels' neck."

"If I'd had my way you would've been swinging from the same noose," Lavenrunz added almost as an afterthought. "The difference between us, as men and officers however, is that I obey the orders I'm given. I respect the chain of command and since the knowledge you supposedly gained tinkering with these machines instead of treating the wounded is considered useful, men with more seniority than me not only let you live, but give you what you've pretty much always wanted."

Gesturing with an arm around the chamber, the Colonel flexed the fingers of his hands. "Unbelievably after all this, you still haven't learned your lesson. You were given strict instructions not to attempt to reactivate any of the Termination Units you were supplied with; that any Learning Computers you encountered were to be mapped digitally – and only digitally – and then destroyed."

"I don't even know how you managed to find the synthetic flesh," He added with a pointed finger towards the sample jars, his powerful jaw twisting in disgust. "I made it clear to the Quartermaster that you were only to be supplied with endoskeletons."

"Please Colonel!" Eliot begged having finally found his voice. "I have discoveries that are of great importance! You must hear me out!"

Lavenrunz shook his head, eyes narrow and patience wearing thin. "I am tired of reading the same "discoveries" in your reports month-after-month. You must think me a fool if you think I do not see the same repetitive nonsense you try to pass off as new--"

"Please Colonel!" The Doctor interrupted for the second time, realising that his time left on the mortal coil might very well be drawing to a close unless he could prove his usefulness. "The Termination Unit you saw – she is unlike anything ever encountered before! A new model! A new type of machine!"

"She?" Stephen spat with disdain. "It is unlike anything we've ever seen," Eliot corrected with a dip of his head. "The technology used in its construction is beyond anything seen anywhere on the Earth. If this is the first of a new wave, we are not prepared for its excellence in infiltration!"

Lavenrunz remained silent for several moments, weighing up what was most likely bluster and a desire to continue surviving when far better men had died so that he might continue to screw up. Still, a man who held the rank of Colonel – a Flag officer no less, did not reach such a position by ignoring the possibility of a threat to focus on his own desire for retribution.

"Make your case," He ordered in as much a threat as a permission to continue.

Eliot nodded and reached over to pick up one of the sample jars from the bench, gesturing at the square of pale flesh resting on a slick circle of congealing crimson inside. "Everything about this TU is revolutionary, Colonel. The flesh for example is not simply a rubber-polymer mixture painted to give the appearance of our skin and heated to give the suggestion of body warmth."

Stephen followed the wiry Doctor as he almost jogged towards a slanted examination table mounted against the side of the chamber, where the disabled Unit had lain since she – or it – had so rudely strangled him and pressed him for the most bizarre, irrelevant information on history. Picking up a slack, pale arm in his hands Van Der Meder ran a fingertip along the flesh to illustrate his point.

"This is real skin, Colonel," He began. "It is every bit as real and living as the skin on your arm or mine. It is supported by a network of vessels, it is nourished and it grows."

Pulling a scalpel from his pocket, he made a knick against the skin and pulled the razor-sharp blade down an inch or two, a red line quickly expanding to become a wound. "It bleeds, Colonel. I do not have the equipment to study it here fully, but it uses some type of synthetic blood substitute that is somehow able to not only carry oxgen to nourish the soft tissue but has some sort of limited immune response. I was able to detect artificial antigens."

Lavenrunz's face was an impassive mask hiding the deep concern of this grave news. During the incident earlier he had been focused entirely on neutralising the threat at hand and only now was he able to examine the Termination Unit more closely, seeing that it appeared no more machine than the slightest glimmer of metal beneath the occasional gouge or cut might suggest.

The TU was virtually indistinguishable – it was totally indistinguishable – from a young girl between twenty and twenty-five years old. Stephen was a muscular, large man with a broad frame but even he paled when compared to the size of even the newest of the Termination Units – invariably standing at almost seven feet and impossibly built so as to fit all of the advanced technologies required to allow them to infiltrate and murder so efficiently.

Advanced technologies rendered obsolete and laughable compared to the knowledge required to manufacture the unit before him.

This TU was slight in size; with tapering limbs which seemed almost delicate – like they would break if taken the wrong way by a strong breeze. The lips which framed a slightly parted mouth were soft and feminine and a million miles from the foam-filled, mannequin-like imitations of the contemporary units he had seen in battle before and now.

A deep sense of foreboding filled the Colonel as he turned towards the Doctor, "What about the Learning Computer?"

Eliot nodded and thrust his hands into the pockets of his labcoat, tongue pushing out from between his lips as he frantically searched for the Chip he'd removed for the second time in as many hours, only a few minutes before. Locating it by virtue of the bloodstain mark on the faded white lapel of his breast pocket, he triumphantly presented a fragile-looking component to the Colonel's scrutiny.

"That's it?" Lavenrunz asked doubtfully. "That's it," Eliot reassured. "From my limited examinations it replaces virtually the entire functionality of the Learning Computers in the current generation of Termination Units. It's accessed via its own dedicated port underneath the scalp; there's no need to strip away the entire head and remove the top of the skull to access the system. I believe it's perfectly feasible to conduct field repairs with minimal equipment – in fact a particularly well-equipped suburban garage would probably be sufficient."

"So what you're telling me," Stephen began as he summed up, "Is that this Termination Unit is faster, more intelligent and more Human-looking than anything that's come before it or we'd ever imagine we could see?"

The Doctor nodded, "It's ever bit like comparing the Kitty Hawk moored outside to the new Obama-class supercarriers. A quantum-leap in technological evolution."

Lavenrunz nodded, in deep consideration. "Give me the Chip," He ordered. Feeling its slight weight in his gloved hand, the Colonel found it impossible – or almost impossible considering he held the evidence in his hand and had partaken in hand-to-hand combat with the evidence in question – to believe that such an advancement could be made so quickly.

"Skynet's been busy ..." He murmured, appearing to finally make up his mind. "Have the Unit taken above-ground and burned. Make sure nothing remains."

"With all due respect Colonel!" Eliot virtually screamed, throwing his hands up in the air in horror. "This could very well be a prototype unit! The first of its new kind! You've seen how advanced it is compared to our current enemy. We cannot pass up this intelligence-gathering opportunity! If we destroy this unit, we hand the advantage in this war to Skynet!"

Stephen grimaced, knowing the logic of the Doctor was, in this case, irrefutable. Resisting the urge to grit his teeth, the Colonel closed his fist around the chip and made his position clear. "Unfortunately I doubt my superiors would see much reason to disagree with you, and any advantage we can leverage against Skynet is worth pursuing. Continue your studies as best you can ..."

Following Van Der Meder's gaze to his closed fist, the Colonel resisted the urge to roll his eyes and instead swept towards the door. "I'll be keeping this."

* * *

"What is it?" Sarah asked finally, after several fruitless hours trying to ignore the stare of the woman opposite. While night and day did not have any real meaning deep in the bowels of a ship as gigantic as the Kitty Hawk, she was more than willing to indulge the near pitch-blackness – broken only by a slither of yellow light spilling underneath the heavy metal door leading out into a maze of twisting, rusting corridors beyond.

Her cellmate was not so willing and despite every effort short of concussing her into unconsciousness, including what must have been an hour rolling over to stare at the opposite wall, Liberty was not dissuaded from her wide-eyed vigil over nothing.

"Just checkin' to see if you were sleepin'," She answered with a straight face. Sarah narrowed her eyes and glanced over, convinced that something so ridiculous could only be said with a smile on the lips. If the southerner had meant it in jest, she showed no signs of it. Sarah let out a long, keening sigh and clasped her hands behind her head as it rested on the pillow, staring straight up at the ceiling. "Let's have it then."

The woman opposite offered a lopsided smile, shrugging her shoulders. "You did a good thing for me today, Baum. The ugly sisters been givin' me plenty trouble lately – the just don't take no for an answer."

"Don't mention it," Sarah grumbled in a tone that hinted at the suggestion being half-serious, toying with the idea of simply rolling back onto her stomach and ending the conversation there and then. Never the most diplomatic or forward-thinking of people, she nonetheless had no desire to become Liberty's champion or self-assigned protector. God knows Sarah had enough people relying on her, depending on her or missing her already without adding another.

Liberty glanced towards the door as if it were likely to fly from its hinges and betray their conversation at any moment, "I want to give you the favour back. Question is, Baum, can I trust you?"

Her interest piqued, Sarah sat up on her elbow, raising an eyebrow. After several moments trying to think of something that might calm the flighty woman, she settled on a simple nod. That same crooked smile returned to Liberty's face as she leaned forwards conspiratorially; voice dropping to a hushed whisper.

"I've got a way off this boat," She hissed. "Gonna leave this tin can so far behind. There ain't a lot of room, Baum, but I probably wouldn't be leavin' if you hadn't helped me out so it's only a fair turn."

"A way out?" Sarah repeated clearly as if she had missed some vital part of the sentence which made it anything but a chance to get out, get her bearings, get Cameron and find John. A long list of goals by any stretch of the imagination but to start a quest for them in prison was not giving her the easiest of starts. Anything that might make that start easier could not be ignored. "How?"

"Got a boat gonna' be creepin' along the ship when we get out for exercise tomorrow mornin'. Not gonna lie to you Baum, ain't gonna be no walk in the park. We got a boat but we still got a fence and wire on top. And guards. We'd have to move fast … Real fast like. Drivin' into Hampton Roads takes real guts and my man ain't gonna wait around and chance a run-in with the Navy."

"We got 'bout a minute after the buzzer goes and we're s'posed to head back inside to the cells. We high-tail it to the port side, get over that fence and over the side and we'll be free gals by sundown. You in?"

Sarah's expression was an equal measure of hope and scepticism; "There are guards all along the watchtower – armed guards. Wouldn't take much for a trained solider to take us down before we clear the fence ..."

"We're on a navy ship moored in a navy yard," Liberty reassured. "They ain't expecting nobody foolish or crazy enough to jump into the big drink. Where they think we gonna' go? Swimmin'? Only difference is we got ourselves a ride."

Sarah nodded, puffing her cheeks out. "How did you plan all this, from in here?"

"I ain't stupid Baum," She replied a little more loudly, face darkening slightly. "I know what they think of me – what they say; that I'm some sorta' retard or dumb-dumb. More's the fool them 'cause they let me wander into places I shouldn't and do things I ain't supposed to, 'cause they think I don't know any better. Bein' a retard in their eyes is the only reason I'm goin' home tomorrow. And you too … If you're in. Make the call, Baum."

Squeezing her eyes shut, Sarah let her mind wonder briefly. Recalling the young face and shoulders burdened by the knowledge of command – her precious son, John. Recalling the bright blue eyes and long brown locks framing a pale face that belied the raw power and genius beneath – her Terminator-turned-Companion, Cameron.

If she ever hoped to see either again, it would obviously never be within the walls of this cell, or the hull of this carrier-turned-prison. A process of elimination left her with no choice.

"I'm in," She whispered before turning away towards the nearest wall. Apparently satisfied, finally, Liberty bedded down likewise.

Free of her cellmate's constant gaze, Sarah still found no more sleep that night.

* * *

The sting of the salt air felt no less refreshing the second time around, as she watched the line shuffling through the hatchway onto the converted flight deck of the Kitty Hawk from her vantage point on the port-side bench. They spread out to form numerous groups of prisoners heading towards the weights, basketball court or the sparring cage – which as far as Sarah could tell, was simply a mesh box where prisoners could brutalise each other without the attention of the guards.

Brushing her billowing hair back behind her ears, Sarah glanced around and down at the rolling waves of the atlantic. Somewhat calmed by the massive defensive walls which enclosed the shipyards and docks in an enormous horseshoe shape, the white crests crashed against the dull metal hull below. They broke impotently on the toughened superstructure which had been designed to withstand bombs, missiles and shells; albeit fired by other humans and not the agents of a self-aware supercomputer.

"How're you feeling?" Liberty asked as much for her own benefit as anyone else's. Sarah shrugged her shoulders and offered the other woman a thin smile. "I'm looking forward to being free. We've got a couple of minutes by my guess."

"Couple of minutes," She croaked, breeding a familiar sense of foreboding in the pit of Sarah's stomach. "If you're having second thoughts, now is the time to tell me and not once we're swinging on the end of some razor wire ..."

"No second thoughts," Liberty snapped resolutely. "No regrets. Just been' a while since I did this sort of thing … Been here a whack' of time, Baum."

"You never told me how you ended up in here," Sarah asked absent-mindedly as she tracked a guard's walk around the nearside watch tower. Several moments passed in silence, forcing Sarah to tear her eyes away from the guard and glance towards her cellmate come partner-in-crime. Liberty smoothed the creases of her bottoms and stood up, craning her neck towards the perimeter fence.

"...War," She answered finally, simply. Sarah nodded – any reply she might have been formulating blown from her lips by the harsh cry of the exercise klaxon blaring over their heads. "Let's do it."

Both women were twenty feet closer to their goal before a single pair of eyes had even found them. It was in fact the prisoners falling into line to head back to the cells who reacted first, crashing into each other as some slowed to take in the spectacle and other stopped, slack-jawed and stunned at what they were witnessing.

"Get moving!" One of the guards bellowed, the end of his baton hovering menacingly over a shaven head. When he got no immediate reaction to his threat, he followed the gaze of the inmate out towards the port side – his own jaw dropping slightly. He fumbled for the radio handset clipped to his breast pocket, "Two runners! Port-midship!" He bellowed over the pop and hiss of static.

Sarah was dimly aware of the howl of a siren rising for a moment above the roar of her blood, as it pounded through her veins from a heart hammering inside her chest. Adrenaline, fear, exhilaration and a dozen other emotions and hormones combined to increase the pounding until the siren was a mere component of the background – her entire purpose of being focused on the fence coming closer with every thud of her boot against the flight deck.

A terrific bang, followed by the tell-tale ping of a ricochet somewhere off to Sarah's left told her the marksmen on the towers overlooking them had found their targets – the first few shots were choice warning rounds; if they did not surrender immediately, the next bullets would spill her thundering blood across the Kitty Hawk and cure Liberty of her madness once and for all.

Fortunately for Sarah, her fingertips curled around the fence meshing before they curled around her palm in a death spasm. Aided by a convenient bollard used for securing mooring lines and now used by the pair as a leaping point, Sarah was halfway up and making good progress when her eyes settled on the atlantic looming below them.

A big blue blanket, entirely devoid of the promised boat.

"Where's the pick-up?" Sarah hissed, suddenly finding the climb much harder as her muscles began to cramp under the demands of hauling her entire bodyweight upwards against the bending, flexible mesh. Receiving no immediate reply she craned her neck around towards Liberty, who stood motionless, hands resting limply on the fence – eyes glassy and vacant in a blank stare towards nothingness.

Gritting her teeth at the demands placed on her left arm to support her entire weight, Sarah leaned off the fence and took a hold of Liberty with her right hand, shaking the woman in a desperate attempt to restore some semblance of life before they both lost theirs. "You picked a hell of a time to go, girlie ..."

"Get off the fence and get down on your knees!" A voice barked scratchily through a speaker grille, leaving absolutely no room for the slightest refusal. Glancing upwards, still perched on the mesh and defying gravity, Sarah watched a fire team of five guardsmen approach – faces hidden behind protective, thick-lensed helmets and composite combat armour.

Each held a pulse rifle with its discharge muzzle pointed squarely at the pair; the sooty stains surrounding the firing points making it obvious that these weapons had fired before and would fire again if they resisted.

"On your fucking knees!" The lead guardsman asked, most likely for the final time. "This is your last warning!"

Hopping down to the flight deck as if her body weight a hundred times more than normal, Sarah glanced at the still-catatonic Liberty, shoulder slumping in defeat as she went about the business of surrendering. Getting down onto her knees, she interlocked her hands behind her head and stared directly ahead at the fire team.

Apparently satisfied, the lead guardsman lowered his rifle, pointing the muzzle down at the flight deck as one of his juniors stepped around behind and secured Sarah's wrists together in a painfully tight plastic restraint. Exchanging nods the lead guardsman stepped forward and without warning, drove the tempered stock of his weapon into Sarah's temple with enough force to send her crashing over to the decking in the opposite direction.

Sarah grunted, vision swimming as she felt a familiar hot slickness run down her forehead, skirting around her eye and into her mouth. She grimaced at the metallic taste, spitting the blood and her throat clear. From her vantage point below, back pressed against the cold metal of the decking, she watched as the lead guardsman tugged away his helmet and finally revealed himself.

A smile born of irony ghosted across Sarah's lips as she instantly understood exactly what was to come. The smile lingered, eventually turning into an absurd grin and for the first time since their arrival in this new, post-apocalyptic but pre-Armageddon time line, laughter spilled from her bloodied lips.

"Something wrong with your head, Baum?" The all-too-familiar guardsman barked, anger written into his powerful features as he received exactly the wrong kind of reaction he had been looking for.

"No problem, sir!" Sarah enthused with sarcasm so obvious it dripped as freely as the crimson from her wound. Rocking herself up and back to kneeling, Sarah wiped her lips clean with her tongue and managed a surprisingly bright smile. "I didn't recognise you without your Lieutenant bars, sir!"

That she had expected the plated boot to her chest did not make it any less painful – her eyes flickering closed, even as the powerful blows reigned down. The individual pain of each fist or foot merged until perversely, the agony subsided as the nerves of her body were overwhelmed and tuned out by a mind quickly losing consciousness.

As her vision greyed and finally faded to black, Sarah swore she saw Liberty break her trance and finally looking down at her.

You picked a hell of a time to go, girlie.

* * *

The house seemed strangely familiar, though she had never stepped through the double-set, varnished oak doors which led inside from the falling snow gathering two feet deep outside. Comfortable warmth spilled invisibly through the hallway, rolling over the thick red carpet which underpinned walls painted a rich, frothy cream. Pictures hung in silver frames; home-made photographs of the summer and winter, flawed with overexposure or glare, which made them all the more valuable for their imperfection.

Sarah pressed her toes deep into the fluffy carpet beneath her bare feet as she stepped through the first doorway to the left, eyes pulled to the enormous fir tree dominating the room and standing easily taller than herself by a clear head and more. Bands of brightly-coloured tinsel spiralled around and between the tree's sloping circles of green needles, competing for space amidst the fairy lights glimmering and shining throughout.

Hundreds of tiny points of light flickered and flashed as if the night skies themselves and all the constellations, stars and galaxies therein shone from inside the fir tree, outwards. Ceramic baubles painted in myriad stripes, designs and polka-dots hung from the dozens of curling arms reaching out from the gnarled, brown trunk still earthy and damp.

Sarah's nostrils flared as the unmistakable tang of burning frankincense wafted under her nose, carried by the warmth of the crackling flames dancing over the blackened logs they consumed, in the fireplace opposite. A smile spread across her lips as she crossed her arms over and held her elbows in her hands – the flickering yellow and orange light reflecting against the glass of the window and illuminating the snow as it continued to fall outside.

"Welcome home," a familiar voice called from the doorway. Sarah turned towards it, her smile widening as Cameron stepped into the living room. Clad in a cobalt-coloured dress which extended down to just above the ankles, a number of shimmering sequins were affixed in spirals and star-crosses across the thigh and around the three-quarter length sleeves, which stopped just above her slender elbows. Shoulder-length brown locks were given a curl and pinned upwards, framing an alabaster face and bright eyes.

Sarah extended her hands for Cameron to take into hers, both melting together in an embrace which went on for moments, and minutes and longer under the approving gaze of the late-December scenery surrounding. Lips brushed together, gently at first but becoming firmer, until they parted and welcomed each other fully. Fingertips traced invisible patterns on flesh, hair brushed away or curled between the same wandering fingertips.

Pulling away enough to lay a kiss on the Terminator's forehead, Sarah sighed contentedly. "Where's John?"

The sound of slow, methodical footsteps from the staircase beyond her sight answered the question for Cameron, who settled instead on laying the side of her head against Sarah's chest. Carefully unpinning the hair at her fingertips, Sarah began to brush through it soothingly, occasionally running a thumb gently across the cheek not buried to her bosom.

Glancing upwards, Sarah's smile brightened as she watched her son shuffle into view, leaning heavily on the cane which supported his arched, inflexible spine. Decades of life had tightened the flesh across his skull in some places and loosened it in others, turning a full head of hair frizzy and white. Bony fingers curled inwards towards the palms, elbows turned outwards by the wasting of muscle and tendon.

In the strictest matters of biological science almost double the age of his mother, his eyes nonetheless seemed to bare the mischief and streetwise of a boy fifty years younger. His chapped lips spread in a mirroring smile, as he took his time to negotiate the short distance.

"Hey mom," He croaked, voice a low and broken whisper. Moving a free arm away from cupping the back of Cameron's head, Sarah passed it through John's white hair, down to the nape of his neck and to his shoulder – giving it an affectionate squeeze. "You did a great job with the house ..."

"Cameron did the legwork ..." John admitted with a wink and a shrug of his tired shoulders. "Wisdom comes from getting old and slow after all … Right?"

Rolling her eyes in mock outrage, Sarah placed a gentle kiss on her son's wrinkled forehead, pressing her cheek against his. Contentedness filled her every pore – so that if happiness were water she could drown happily in this room here, now. Every important facet of her life that she could not function without, could not see a reason to exist if lost, had come together under the shadow of something Sarah had spent virtually all of her life being denied the simple pleasure of.

"It's a beautiful tree," She said to the Terminator nuzzling her bosom and the elderly son nodding his head in agreement. There seemed no sense of the passage of time in this place – the candles which burned brightly on the mantelpiece did not consume their wick, or deposit spent wax. The antique, silver-and-gold-rimmed clock hanging from the wall continued its metronomic tick-tock, heavy pendulum swinging from side-to-side but neither hand ever moved forward.

"I wish this were real," Sarah confessed with brutal honesty she had rarely ever faced so completely. "I wish I could stay ..."

Cameron traced her way up to the nape of Sarah's neck and then her cheek, brushing her own lips against the older woman's and offering a warm, dazzling smile. "We're waiting for you, out there. But you have to wake up first ..."

"Come get us Mom," John agreed, leaning on his cane to give his aged bones a rest and nodding thoughtfully. "Wake up and come get us."

* * *

Sarah bolted upright so quickly that the nerves – carrying the protests of pain from the bruised muscles being used to awaken – were beaten by the orders of the brain. A wave of nausea overwhelming her balance and would have sent her rolling off of the gurney, were her limbs not strapped to its toughened steel frame which in itself was bolted directly to the floor. Sinking back prone and feeling her head hit the pillow underneath with a soft thump, she blinked away the confusion and mental fog.

She had seen them both, in some sort of delusion or dream given a limited run of her mind; Cameron and John – the latter aged as only a jaunt through time could achieve – in a house that she had never seen before, yet had felt undeniably like home. She had felt no fear or disgust at missing decades of her son's life, nor any gut-wrenching sorrow for being unable to stay with the Terminator. Instead all three lived for a moment that seemed slowed by a force outside of all science and reason, as if a single second had been stretched by God to span a year.

A shadow looming over her face brought Sarah back into the moment. A woman of no more than twenty five years of age leaned over the bed, platinum-blonde hair pulled back and tied in a severe bun pinned to the back of her head. Her sky-blue coloured uniform identified her branch of service as the United States Air Force, but a white laboratory coat worn over the top and the silver rod of Asclepius pinned to the lapel of the service jacket she wore identified her as belonging to the Air Force's medical wing.

Brown eyes searched for Sarah's, above sunken, pale crescent-shaped bags of skin as if the woman had battled sleepless nights as a matter of course. Her flesh was pale – not simply without the touch of the sun but so light that if a strong lamp were shone above her head, it might reveal the network of arteries and veins beneath her skin.

"I'm Doctor Anna Kennedy," The blonde introduced as she retrieved a pen-light from her breast pocket and twisted the base. "Please follow the light with your eyes. First to the left ..."

Sarah squinted at the brightness but did as she was told – the restraints making sure she had little other choice. The woman nodded in satisfaction and placed the light back in her pocket. Reaching over to the bedside table she snatched up a clipboard and rifled through the various handwritten sheets and graphs, her brow furrowed in concentration. "Do you know where you are?"

"In a lot of trouble," Sarah answered with a rueful sigh and a frown as she felt the various dull aches of bruises across her stomach, thighs and upper arms. The tightness in her cheek and on her bottom lip marked cuts stitched closed; the after-taste of blood in the back of her throat confirming it.

The Doctor switched topics seamlessly, "You weren't in the best shape when you came in – there was some swelling in your brain and your breathing was erratic, but everything looks good now. Would you like something to eat?"

"How long was I out?" Sarah asked as she overcame the stiffness in her back to sit up as best the restraints would allow. The Doctor glanced at her wristwatch and then at the clipboard, lips pursed as she tapped a pen against her fingers. "This'll be your tenth night under my care ..."

Sarah blew her cheeks out, bringing her head back against the pillow. "I guess it's true what they say … You can never get enough sleep. I still feel tired."

"That's to be expected after your injuries," The Doctor assured with a weak smile that her eyes did not much support. What little smile graced her pale face disappeared utterly, as the heavy hatchway to the sickbay swung open to admit two very different guardsman.

Sarah had seen that look before – the look of terror incarnate restrained only by the fear of making it all so much worse by letting anyone know the truth. That to admit to the truth would cause the world itself to crack and fall down, burying you underneath the weight of everything you've carried as baggage on your weary shoulders.

"Lieutenant," The Doctor greeted without the slightest hint of warmth or affection, her brown eyes wrinkled almost imperceptibly. The large, powerfully built man who had made it his mission to make Sarah's life as difficult and unpleasant as possible, stepped forwards with a more familiar, more kindly sergeant in tow. The senior guardsman laid a support hand on the small of the Doctor's back, eliciting the slightest shiver and grimace from the woman.

"Do you visit all the inmates you almost kick to death, sir?" Sarah asked nonchalantly, any plan she had formulated to keep her head down now blown out of the water and sheared apart in the air, so that it was almost certain she was damned irrespective of her behaviour or future deeds.

"That's cute Baum," The Lieutenant grunted as he left the Doctor behind and moved to the side of the bed. "If you think you can try and escape from a military prison without suffering the consequences, they'd best wheel your trolley over to Psych."

He leaned over, crossing his arms and resting his considerable weight on the gurney's side-guard. "Might want to consider that, at least that way you'd have been able to wriggle out of getting what's coming to you. What? You thought that was it? A little kicking and then some tender loving care from the good Doctor? Not by a long shot, Baum. You're in a military prison and we don't tolerate the kind of stunt you pulled."

Sarah discreetly tugged at the restraints as if they might release her and grant the chance to give the bubbling, rumbling fury which twisted her gut a release. At that exact moment, there was no more powerful an urge to closer her fingers around the exposed neck opposite and squeeze it until all the arrogance, all the cockiness and all the brutality had been drained away along with the blood from his brain.

"They're going to string you up, Baum," He announced almost gleefully, leaning towards her. "They're going to slip a noose around your neck and send you ten feet down through the floor."

"Bang!" He shouted, smacking the flat of his palm against the wall to illustrate the sound of the trapdoor. We'll see how you carry yourself when you're dangling at the end of the rope, twisting in the breeze."

Sarah reared upwards, with enough speed to drive her forehead into the bridge of the Lieutenant's nose before he had a chance to react. An audible crack reverberated around the room as the cartilage snapped under the assault. The guardsman staggering backwards, hands cupping a red mess above his snarling mouth.

"I don't need to wait for a rope Baum!" He spat. "I'll finish you right here, right now!"

"That's enough Lieutenant," The sergeant barked as if it were he who had the command authority. "You're still facing a formal investigation into how the escape attempt ended. You don't need any more attention brought on this."

The larger man's eyes narrowed, as if daring his subordinate to stop him directly. After several moments of silence in which the sergeant's gaze never dipped or waved, the senior officer reluctantly nodded. "Fine – let's get the hell out of here. See you in hell, Baum."

"I'll save you a seat," Sarah grunted.

Sweeping past the Doctor, the Lieutenant paused to lean into her ear, her eyes squeezing closed in passive resistance. "I'll see you later," He cooed crudely before continuing through the hatch and slamming it shut with a clanging, echoing thud.

The irony that this new world promised so much, while choosing to punish her repeatedly for the vagaries of fate was not lost on Sarah, who barely stifled the urge to groan at it all. Flexing her fingers against the bindings around her wrist and ankles, she glanced up at the light bulb hanging from the cabling which linked it to the ceiling.

Her stomach turned at the metaphor. The Christmas scene imagined in a fever or a vacuum of thought earlier had never seemed more unobtainable or ridiculous, as this new hope for a brighter future for Mankind was rapidly becoming a new personal nightmare for Sarah. One she was suffering through alone – those most important to her scattered by the winds of fate and the capriciousness of time to who knew where, or when.

* * *

The four concrete walls she now called home were an improvement over the rusting, shoebox-sized cell Sarah had shared with Liberty just over a week ago in the same way that losing a foot was, perhaps, better than losing a hand. The bed she rested on was nothing more than a thin mattress resting atop a concrete box, beside a sink and toilet made out of the same heavy, grey material.

Save for the thinnest line separating the door from its frame and a hatch for the passing of slop which apparently constituted food, there was no obvious break in the walls uniform blandness.

Cradling her bruised ribs as she sat up, Sarah pressed the back of her head against the concrete and passed away the minutes, hours and days thinking. Thinking of her son, wherever he was leading men and women to battle, as had been his destiny in countless timelines and would doubtlessly be no different in this one.

If there were one small mercy granted it was that full decades had past for John and hopefully, surely, time had healed the wounds of the loss of his mother. Perhaps Derek had taken him under his wing and schooled him in the arts of war; trained him well in the weapons and tactics he would eventually need to face down Skynet. Sarah dared to dream even that perhaps he had found the time to meet someone, a woman who could endure the stress and strain of the role of supporting someone who led a resistance.

Undoubtedly even if John had never truly gotten over her "death", he had accepted it by now. It was almost certain that news of what happened here would not make its way to wherever he plotted the destruction of Skynet and its agents from – he would never know differently. That was a rare blessing Sarah could truly feel, perversely, thankful for.

Even thinking of her name gave Sarah that same butterfly-feeling in the pit of her stomach that any number of young women feel when they were wept off their feet by someone – or perhaps something – they did not even see coming. Even thinking of her name made her palms grow slick and her throat painfully dry.

Cameron was an utterly unique individual – high praise in a world where Humanity battled a sentient supercomputer and where pulse rifles and other exotic implements of death, previously the reserve of science-fiction, were employed day-to-day. A machine designed to emulate humans so as to better kill humans, somewhere along the line she had moved from emulation to replication; the combination of computing power and sophisticated software merging and growing, until it more resembled the human mind it was supposed to only ape.

Cameron had emulated love before in the course of her mission to protect John but then, having taken the first pivotal steps towards replicating it when the pair, along with Cromartie, defeated Skynet-given-form in the absurdly familiar surroundings of a steel-making plant, Sarah could honestly say in the privacy of being alone – if not being quite ready to shout it from the rooftops – that she felt every bit part of the evolution.

She had not stood by and watched Cameron evolve, she had actively encouraged it even with harsh words and misunderstandings. What they had together had all the hallmarks of love – Sarah holding back from calling it that only because she had not yet put the demons of Skynet and the machines fully to bed, and because she doubted whether Cameron had learned enough to know truly what love was.

The truth was unavoidable and it was inescapable. Sarah wanted to finish the lesson – she desperately wanted Cameron to truly know what love was by her hand and her guide; she wanted Cameron to help put her own demons to rest. Ironically so that Sarah had felt this world, where somehow Humanity had avoided the devastation of Judgement Day and had a new, brighter future, might be the place where she could leave her prejudices and hatreds behind.

Here for perhaps the first time since adulthood had begun, she did not have to constantly fear the appearance of Skynet or its agents. There were vast concrete walls and multi-barrelled defensive cannons and tens of thousands of troops to repel any potential attack – she was as safe here from the insidious evil of the metal as anywhere else on the planet.

Sarah did not have to worry about her death at the hands of Skynet. Her own race was already seeing well to that, without any help from the implacable computer intelligence which had orchestrated the destruction of Mankind more than once, depending on the multiple timelines created, destroyed or still to be realised.

The loud clang of a series of locks being disengaged snapped her head up from staring at her toes, the cell door swinging open to admit a now very familiar army sergeant. Although his baton was not drawn he held a pair of handcuffs loosely in his palm, his expression immediately speaking a thousand words protocol, or his own sense of martial pride, would not allow.

"That's it?" Sarah asked with brutal honesty, pushing herself to the edge of the painfully thin mattress. "No final meal? No priest?"

The sergeant hesitated for the barest moment, the only indication he felt he was doing anything other than his duty as ordered by his superiors – however repugnant they might be. Sarah knew well enough that the chain of command did not allow for personal feelings; indeed had she not coached her son on the importance of placing rational, logical thought ahead of instincts-from-the-gut?

Had she not prepared her son, as best she could, to be willing to send people to their deaths? For the greater good the smaller few laid down their lives?

"He's watchin', Baum," The sergeant said finally. "He's up there and he knows the good 'uns from the bad 'uns. You don't need a man of god to spot that. You'll be fine."

Subconsciously massaging her wrists, Sarah nodded. "I just expected to be sitting here for longer … Maybe weeks, months ..."

"Maybe in Civvie street," The guardsman shrugged, "Back when there was a Civvie street. Life in the military is all about efficiency – so's death in the military. I kind of guess you know more than you let on about it. For what it's worth Baum – and I know it ain't worth a hell of a lot right now, you've conducted yourself with honour. I don't care why you're in here, you ain't some common-as-mud, petty thief. You carry yourself and you look out for others."

The gnarled veteran nodded his head affirmatively. "You've got some moves on you too – moves that wouldn't look out of place in this uniform, if things had gone differently. There ain't no shame in it, Baum. Ain't no shame at all."

Letting out a long, keening sigh she nodded. "Call me Sarah."

Holding out her arms to be cuffed, the sergeant brought the heavy metal manacles to bare and then thought better of it, stuffing them back into his duty belt and shaking his head. This wasn't the first time he'd escorted the condemned to die and it wouldn't be the last – he'd seen it all; those that go almost catatonic, so that you couldn't even be sure that they were awake. Glassy-eyed and drooling, listing and leaning from step to step.

There were those that screamed and begged for mercy, their cheeks flushed red and their eyes swollen with tears as they recanted their guilt or plain-up pleaded for clemency. When that failed they would trash and fight like demons – worse than demons, they would fight, literally, for their life. Every inch closer to the gallows would be like hauling the entire Kitty Hawk up onto the land with one man and a rope.

He could see that there would be no insanity from the raven-haired woman opposite. While he did not particularly want to see her die – a sinful waste for a race at war – he had no intention of doing anything other than his duty, to which she understood and accepted and for that, he was grateful.

"On the bounce, Sarah," He ordered. Stepping aside and gesturing to the hatchway.

* * *

If the Moon was an errant thief, stealing her pale light from the Sun as Sarah half-remembered from who knew when, it was a welcome observer to the grisly business at hand. It hung as a full circle of ash-grey, pockmarked by the darker recesses of ten thousand asteroidal impacts millions of years apart. The sky it lit dimly was a blanket of the deepest black, which met the horizon so totally that one could not see where said sky ended, and the atlantic began – save the tumulus white strip of moonlight drawing a line into the nothingness of the sea beyond.

She could see that the business of putting inmates to death had been, like many military systems and procedures, made to take advantage of existing infrastructure. Usually hosting nothing more fatal than a particularly harsh trouncing for one of its teams, the basketball court marked out in faded, chipped white paint against the weather-beaten steel of the Kitty Hawk's flight deck had been requisitioned; appropriated for something altogether less pure than the idea of sporting competition.

The goal furthest away towards the bow of the Kitty Hawk, standing almost three metres high had been stripped of its headboard and basket ring – appearing far more like the right-angle arm of a gallows of ages-past than its designers might otherwise have intended. Usually hidden by the headboard, a steel eyelet hung welded to the underneath of the right-angle. A length of thick, scratchy rope fed through and swayed slightly in the salty ocean breeze – as if the elements were tugging on the end of the infamous noose.

Following the sergeant forwards, she adjusted to the limited light provided by the dazzling spotlights focused on the basketball court-turned-execution-chamber from high-up on the Kitty Hawk's command island. Sarah could just about make out the slightest lip between the flight deck and a trapdoor barely two feet wide, directly underneath the swaying noose. Standing aside the door, a faceless man wearing an officer's uniform stood ready – features obscured by a black felt hood save a pair of stony eyes.

Much to Sarah's relief – absurd considering what was about to happen – his rank pins were of a Major and not a Lieutenant. As if sensing her trepidation the sergeant leaned in and put the fear to rest, before all her fears along with hopes and dreams were put to rest forever.

"He's not even watching, Sarah," He assured. "Hold that head high."

Sarah nodded dumbly, licking her dry lips and struggling to swallow over the raspy throat that made anything other than the nod impossible. She stopped short of the trapdoor, taking one last opportunity to wipe her clammy forehead clear, before her arms were gently guided behind her back and finally shackled together. Her head tilted up to gaze at the night sky which seemed so utterly featureless that, Moon aside, she could have squeezed her eyes shut and seen no difference.

As if agreeing with her, a single point of the slightest, glimmering light broke through the black; shining with light already millions of years old by the time it had crossed the incalculably vast expanse of interstellar space to reach this small, blue marble. She could not have John or Cameron here with her – indeed she would not allow it even if it were possible – so Sarah took some small comfort in the star, pretending for all the good it would do, that it had come to make sure she was not alone physically.

The star did not need to do any more than that. Her brave son, future and possibly present hope for Humanity and the once terrifying, often curious Terminator-turned-companion were always held close to her heart even after it had stopped beating. Even after her body was consigned to the Earth which had once borne her, and the decades since her death rolled by.

Sarah's eyes fixed on the executioner opposite who held a hood similar to the one he wore in his hands, save the provision of holes for the eyes. She stepped onto the trapdoor, sucking in a final lungful of free air and opening her eyes widely to let the salty air sting and irritate them. She nodded towards the faceless Major, who seemed to relax slightly at the cooperation of the condemned.

She craned her neck but did not resist as she felt a pair of hands gather up her hair carefully. Her eyes locked on the disciplined, but all-too-human gaze of the sergeant, who had nonetheless treated her with a basic respect one could all too easily lose for one's kin in a place like this.

"What's your name?" Sarah whispered hoarsely, her voice rising above the crashing of the briny waves against the Kitty Hawk's waterline below. The sergeant's lips curled upwards in the slightest shadow of a smile as he finished scooping her hair out of the way.

Stepping back and to the side, the veteran laid a protective hand on Sarah's shoulder and added the slightest squeeze. "Name's Curtis. Curtis King."

Managing a weak but honest smile in return, Sarah nodded. The hooded Major stepped forward and carefully slid the black felt over her head, until the hiss of the sea and the creaking of the ship under the force of the ocean was muffled to vague thuds and hushed groans.

Her breath came in short, ragged gasps as she fought to hold her nerve. The hood felt claustrophobic; hot and becoming slick with the water vapour she breathed out. All other sounds were drowned out by the frantic thundering of her heart, as if it had chosen now to escape the imminent death of the rest of her body by smashing its way to freedom through her ribcage.

Sarah felt a heavy weight brush against her temple and then settle around her neck – a slight tug applied against her throat, as the heavy knot settled behind an ear.

She idly wondered, foolishly, as those about to die often do if her star was still watching.

Each second that passed seemed like ten-million times its number, as Sarah waited, agonizingly, for the ear-splitting crack of the trapdoor as it crashed downwards and sent her body plummeting, to be broken like a ceramic doll dropped from a great height to the hard, unforgiving ground.

Without warning, the felt hood which choked her so was ripped upwards and away from her features – the first breath of the salty ocean air hitting the back of Sarah's throat as if she had just been cut, struggling and jerking, from the end of the noose itself. Eyes blinded by the glare of the resurgent Moon she frantically squeezed her eyes open and shut, shaking her head from side to side and feeling the scratchy rope cut into the flesh of her neck.

"Sarah Baum?" A voice boomed with authority. Eyes finally readjusting to her surroundings, Sarah found herself virtually face-to-face with a powerfully built stranger garbed in the officer's uniform of the United States Army. Wearing an olive-green greatcoat which billowed upwards in the winds, the stranger's hard stare seemed to burn through her own eyes and out through the back of her skull.

For the barest few moments, Sarah found herself holding her breath, fearing she stood nose-to-nose with a Terminator. Cautiously she let out a long, quiet sigh as the stare seemed less emotionless than simply impeccably disciplined. "Sarah Baum?" The officer repeated.

Sarah nodded dumbly.

"You were found guilty of your crime by a Court of Military Justice in good standing," He began powerfully. "Your sentence is death to be carried out here and now. As a Flag Officer of the United States Military, I am duly authorised to exercise my right to selective conscription in wartime situations."

"I thereby and hereby offer you one chance and one chance only to avoid being hung by the neck until dead. The offer is yours to refuse – in which case the hood will be drawn back over your head and I will order your sentence to be carried out. What is your decision?"

Sarah's mouth was agape, ignoring the bitter taste of the salt of her own sweat which still dripped down from her temple and forehead. She had so many questions – so very many questions all clamouring to be asked at once. These questions however, could only be answered if she were still alive and as such there was no real choice at stake; any opportunity to live and to see her son and Cameron again could not be ignored.

"I agree," She said simply.

The officer nodded, gesturing with a brown, leather-gloved hand towards the executioner. "Remove the noose. Release the shackles, sergeant."

The man Sarah had only recently come to know as Curtis King nodded sharply, snatching the key from his duty belt and making short work of the locked restraints. Rubbing her wrists reflexively she suddenly became aware of the chill of the night air, suppressing the shiver trying to run down her spine and spread goosebumps across her exposed skin.

"My name is Colonel Stephen Lavenrunz," The officer announced in a tone that demanded Sarah's attention and obedience. "Welcome to the United States Army 211th Corrections Battalion, 14th Penal Regiment – Cerebus Company."

Lavenrunz's piercing gaze did not drift the slightest millimetre from Sarah's still shell-shocked features. "Welcome to The Canaries."

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_**To Be Continued …**_


	5. Chapter 5 : Defending The Flag

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything, including the oxygen used to fuel the fingers that typed this. FOX is my lord and master, its will be done.**

**PAIRING: Camerah, of course!**

**RATING: Some violence, adult themes.**

**FEEDBACK: If you take the time read this, please take the time to let me know. If I wrote for myself, I'd be content with just thinking out aloud. I write for the enjoyment of others. **

**AUTHOR'S COMMENTS : Bonus points for the film references!  
**

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_She Who Dares Wins, by A.P. Stacey_

_Chapter V : Do not ask what your country can do for you ..._

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Lavenrunz tugged a single brown leather glove from his left hand, dropping it the short distance down to the polished stainless steel table below. Shrugging the olive-green greatcoat from his broad shoulders and sweeping the officer's cap from the top of his head, the Colonel briefly adjusted the already impeccably-straight knot of his tie and lowered himself into one of two folding chairs arranged either side.

"Coffee?" He asked neutrally, gesturing towards the dented percolator sat atop the table.

Sarah suppressed the urge to cough as her dry throat failed to find any words to reply, while her mind struggled to deal with the maelstrom of thoughts vying with each other for supremacy and attention. Only a few minutes earlier she had stood on a trapdoor – heavy, scratchy rope coiled about her neck in a noose as she stood on her tiptoes, her heart hammering against the prison of her chest.

In those moments between gulping air into her lungs at the end of the hangman's noose and being offered coffee she had received a commutation of her sentence, an induction into a penal regiment of some sort and an escort back into the relative warmth of the Kitty Hawk's island superstructure on her own two feet, rather than inside a box. Unsurprisingly, it took Sarah more than a few moments to bring some order to her thoughts and steel herself for whatever was coming next.

Lavenrunz poured the piping hot blackness into the two dented mugs provided, his slate-grey gaze never addressing the pot in his hands. "It's time to come back into the room, Baum," He ordered with every bit the firm voice of authority that should surely belong to a Flag-Officer. "They'll be time for thanking whatever god you believe in that you're still alive later ..."

Sarah perched herself on the edge of the remaining chair, turning her considerable willpower to the task of quelling the questions which fought to spill from her lips. Despite her reprieve she was not so naïve to think that suddenly, this man or the system he represented were willing to entertain a change of heart. She was still alive because they wanted something.

"Why am I still alive?" Sarah asked bluntly.

Stretching the single gloved hand across the table, the Colonel set a mug down in front of Sarah and folded his hands back together. "Let's start as we mean to go on," He suggested in a manner that did not suggest it was much of a free choice. "If you're are now a soldier in the United States Army, I expect you to act accordingly. As such I expect at least a single "Sir" in every question you pose and every answer you provide. Is that clear, Baum?"

"Perfectly, sir," She accepted. There was no hint of malice in the grey eyes which met her own stare – unlike the insufferable guard who had almost fractured her skull in his pursuit of supposed respect. Only the guarded face of a man who had fought, as she had fought, stood opposite.

"Secondly," Lavenrunz began without missing a beat, "As your commanding officer I expect you to tell me your real name."

Sarah was too slow to hide the shock which flashed across her features – not necessarily because of the question itself, but the way it had been asked; so assuredly, so certainly as if somehow the man opposite was utterly convinced that she was not who she claimed to be. Knowing she was caught out and knowing the officer opposite knew, Sarah conceded. "How did you know … Sir?"

Stephen leaned back in the chair, resting his broad shoulders against the bulkhead behind. "We take the raw recruits and we turn them into soldiers. We take the youngsters who saw a war film or three, spent too long daydreaming about honour and valour and somehow think they have what it takes to mimic their mind's eye, and we strip away their delusion. We make them run until they're sick and then we make them run some more. We make them shoot at the same target until they can hit from fifty metres. One hundred metres. Two hundred metres.

"We school them in the art of tactics and the making of war and then we tell them they've learned nothing and we school them again. We toughen their body and we strengthen their soul. Most don't make it – most wash out, made all the worse for their experience and carrying bitterness about how things could have been if we'd been easier on them ..."

Lavenrunz cocked his head to the side, taking his eyes off of Sarah for the first time. "Some knuckle down. Some dig their heels into the mud and when we're shouting at them, screaming, frothing at the mouth that they're not good enough; that they should just sink down into the ground and give up, they drag themselves on. Those that show they can go on when everyone around them cannot have what it takes. They will become soldiers.

"You don't need to know what they do, you can see it in their eyes. You can see it in the way they carry themselves.

"I can see it in your eyes," The Colonel revealed, finally. "I can see it in the way you carry yourself. I saw it in the way you organised your escape attempt and gave the entire contingent guarding the Flight Deck the slip – Yes, I was privileged to watch your dash in my case; fortunate in your case because you would certainly be dead by this point if I had not.

"If your escape attempt had been with anyone other than Liberty, you might very well have succeeded. Unfortunately you won't be the first to try and I dare say you won't be the last to feel a noose around your neck for the attempt--"

"I don't understand," Sarah interrupted, exasperated and growing more than a little unsettled under this most genteel of interrogations. Lavenrunz narrowed his eyes but forgave the slip, bringing his mug up to his lips.

"By my count that's the seventh time – maybe the eighth – that Liberty has tried to escape with another inmate. Was it the same story? The waiting boat?" The Colonel asked, nodding his own head after Sarah reluctantly nodded hers. "Whatever she told you about how she came to be here is a lie, although not one she is aware she tells.

"Liberty was as sane as any person can reasonably be in these times when she was first processed here. She talks of the war as if she were posted to a unit fighting on the Western Red Line, but she was a simple technician at a National Air Guard base in what was once Arizona. Her madness was the result of her skull breaking her fall down a stairwell – I believe you've met the man responsible ..."

Sarah's jaw set, her teeth gritting together, "Let me guess, Colonel – he wears Lieutenant bars?"

"Lavenrunz nodded, taking another sip of his coffee. "While her madness excuses the delusions which make her think she can ever leave here, those that agree to accompany her are almost always sane of mind. You're the first of her partners to avoid death as punishment …

"To get back to the matter at hand," The officer ordered, "You have training and you have skill. I have no doubt that you also know how to handle a weapon, and I have read the reports regarding the men you dispatched before your imprisonment that confirm you are perfectly capable of defending yourself without arms. This is nominally a military prison but we have a substantial civilian inmate population …

"There's not a great deal of information about you – the first casualty of war is logistics and any information held about you by pre-war nominally civilian agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the CIA, have long since been lost. I don't need an extensive file to know you're a soldier of some sort; I don't need the CIA or the FBI to tell me you know how to fight."

Lavenrunz swirled the cold dregs of coffee about the bottom of the mug in his hand, "Information is a precious commodity whether you're fighting a war or walking down a street. It was a guess, but one born out of experience, that you weren't who you said you were. Let's start again, then. What's your name, soldier?"

There was no way to avoid the question and there was simply not the lie to cover up the lie exposed, leaving no other option but the truth. In a strange way, she did not necessarily feel vulnerable in revealing something that would have gripped her hand in palpitation but a few weeks earlier – when the name Baum or Dixon was the sole piece of armour she could wear innocently crossing the street, or buying groceries. A defence that came free with the ability to tell a little white lie and offer a sincere smile.

"Sarah Connor," She breathed in almost a whisper, as if the revelation might pop the rivets from their holes and shear the bulkheads apart and break the entire aircraft carrier in two. Realising she was holding her breath as if waiting for the briny waters of the foamy Atlantic to flood through the decking beneath her feet, Sarah puffed her cheeks out.

For his part the Colonel nodded, the answer hardly revelatory or ground-breaking. "Very good, Connor. Where did you learn the basics? You've got a paramilitary look about you."

Sarah nodded, bringing the lukewarm mug to her mouth for the first time in the long minutes it had spent ignored on the tabletop. "Central America – spent a little time in Mexico ..."

"A lot of time," She corrected and admitted. The bitterness of the black stuff almost forced her to wince but she was grateful for the reaction, having missed the kick of caffeine running through her veins instead of the cell-burning, perpetually short high of adrenaline. Sarah guessed the next question would be about family, relatives – anything that tied her down to the here and now. Thoughts irresistibly turned to John, wherever he was and whatever he was doing with his life without his mother to watch over him, or burn his dinner.

Instead of continuing his line of questioning, Lavenrunz climbed to his feet and swept his officer's cap up from the tabletop. "It's time to get down to business, Connor," He announced while folding the bulk of his greatcoat over one arm. "You look lean, fit and quick but you're not lean enough, fit enough or quick enough for the United States Army."

Brushing at the sleeves of his duty jacket, the Flag Officer fixed the full depth of his grey gaze on the woman before him. "If you're going to take advantage of the chance I'm offering you, then you're going to have to run until you're sick and then you're going to have to haul yourself up and run some more. It's time you were put through your paces."

"If you satisfy the drill instructor, and believe me that's no mean feat, we'll talk again."

The heavy door came away from its frame reluctantly and screeching loudly, locking wheel spinning slowly in poorly greased thread holes, choked with rust and the creeping corrosion of decades of service without so much as an engineer's cursory glance. Gesturing to a figure beyond the wall, the imposing Colonel disappeared into the labyrinth steel corridors which made up the bulk of the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk.

Finishing the dregs of her own cup and feeling all the better for it, Sarah climbed to her own feet and flexed her fists subconsciously. Forget the questions, forget the mysteries – forget the complexities of time travel and forget the consequences of skipping decades. Right here, right now nothing could appeal more than the chance to pound her boots against the decking, feeling the salty sweat of her body as she pushed it to the very limits of its endurance and sucking in as much air as her aching chest could accommodate with each jerk of her diaphragm.

Sarah was a soldier; she had proved it in surviving the original T-101 sent to murder her aged a mere nineteen. She had proved it in surviving the T-1000 and its terrible ability to mimic anyone she loved and everything she feared. She had proved it in protecting her son from Skynet's every machination and Machiavellian plot.

She would prove it, once again – this time to the United States Army.

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Cameron rebooted one hundred and twenty seconds after the isolation door behind her slammed closed with the thundering echo of several five-inch thick deadbolts, firing in a fattened circular pattern into reinforced ports securing the bulkhead to the frame. Deceptively normal eyes scanned her surroundings through a multi-visual spectrum beyond the capability of any creature to see – human or otherwise.

The corridor was a simple metal box six feet in width and twenty feet in length; conspicuous with an occasional row of countersunk rivets, married with the narrow cylindrical holes cut through the ceiling to allow a half-dozen spotlights to shine downwards. With only the hesitation of computations carried out at the speed of light, Cameron stalked forwards and brought her lithe fingertips up to the nearest rivet seam.

Impossibly delicate hands forced themselves underneath toughened steel which had had itself been warped by the mere act of riveting, to create a fixing to the superstructure underneath every bit as strong as the steel itself. With no need to steady herself courtesy of the considerable weight of her own coltan-based endoskeleton, Cameron made short work of tearing the sheets apart and from the wall with the screech of metal twisted beyond tolerances.

The steel had been forged in the fiercest fires; hammered and pressed and refined to offer the staunchest resistance to attack but crumpled and scrunched and was tossed aside as if it were merely grey crepe paper, more suited for a child's collage than armour plating. The reinforced concrete wall behind the discarded, twisted plating which revealed itself however called upon a vast reserve of strength.

Her secondary systems alone – without need for her chip to intervene – were capable of calculating and reporting, without the reluctance or irritation of her high-level functions, that her endoskeleton could not come close to providing a third of the strength necessary to find a way through the concrete.

Cameron indulged in the urge to frown – She could not go around the doors and she could not go through them. What then was the point of being brought back on-line by her apparent captors and jailers, if only to stand in a corridor? The obvious answer was simple observation; if the junked remains of the Termination Units she had seen in Doctor Der Meder's grossly misnamed surgical suite were any indication, the technological capacity of Skynet was somehow much reduced, made considerably inferior to the time line which had constructed her.

The obvious answer was, obviously, the wrong one as her auditory sensors isolated the sound of running water. Bright blue eyes panned across the corridor searching for the source but they were beaten to it by Cameron's flesh, which registered the freezing waterfall a split-second before her head snapped upwards to watch it crash from the cylindrical holes which had provided a sterile, bright white light a moment before.

The dichotomy between Cameron's origin and nature played out in the seconds following the beginning of the drenching, a perfect illustration to the tug-of-war between (wo)man and machine; the struggle between two worlds so utterly different, that to marry them together would be to introduce fire to ice and expect the temperature to equalise at pleasant and clement.

Her Secondary Systems received information, processed it against an existing database of limitations, tolerances and triggers and reacted in measured, appropriate ways. The dermal sensors buried deep beneath her scalp, atop the plating of her cranium detected the sudden drop in the temperature of the flesh covering them, triggering automatic countermeasures such as warming the blood substitute and dilating the capillaries and arteries it ran through beneath the skin.

The complex system of gyroscopic stabilisers and inertia balancers, which allowed her heavy coltan limbs to move with the deceptive grace of a young girl, was prepared for the effort required to wade through the water now passing Cameron's calves in depth.

As her body went about the business of preparing itself – as it always did, quite autonomously – Cameron's mind, her chip, pursued a distinctly human course of action. Bringing a palm up to the top of her forehead to shield her eyes from the bizarre, artificial downpour, the most curious panic began to build within; not one born from a fear of the water for a Terminator simply could not drown in the conventional sense.

Feeling her throat fill with water would neither perturb her nor slow her down. The oxygen-extraction pump in her chest, which fairly approximated the function of the lungs would be able to extract the vital gas so necessary to nourish her flesh from water without much trouble, save a loss of efficiency. Capable of seeing in the Infra-Red, Thermal, Electromagnetic and Gamma-wave spectrum Cameron's eyes would function whether on dry land, under water on in a vacuum. None of her vital systems were concerned.

She was not concerned with her own survival for the endoskeleton beneath her flesh was capable of surviving impossible temperature extremes; the coldest, freezing nothingness or the hot blast of energised plasma itself, at thousands of degrees centigrade.

Sloshing through the water which now stood knee-deep and would be a formidable opponent, if her bones were made of mere ossified calcium rather than tempered coltan, she lay her pale hands upon the concrete wall and pressed her forehead against the hard surface. What concerned her was the complete loss of control – the complete lack of information about what was going on beyond the two doors to the corridor she stood in, let alone the wider complex she was imprisoned in, or the bizarre new time she had journeyed to accidentally.

The mission had been a failure of the most terrible proportions. John was gone – abandoned to his own fate over fifty years ago. Sarah was gone – abandoned only a few short days ago but for all intents and purposes it did not matter if the Moon had twirled around her fair Earth, presenting the same face for a revolution or four. It did not matter if the Earth had in turn completed her own dance around the burning, raging fire of Sol and dipped a hemisphere in greeting fifty times over.

They were gone and Cameron had failed in her programmed, irresistible duty to protect them. Once upon a time all that had mattered was the code which gave her hardware life, defined her universe and the goals of her existence. Somewhere along the line, however, the code had been supplanted by new directives not written but evolved; not copied but created anew.

She did not understand any of this – not least the point of this concrete shell rapidly filling like a tank without a purpose. There was not a single anchor of reference in this strange time she could secure herself against, the solid ground under her feet might as well be the seabed a thousand fathoms deep for all the support it lent her soaking feet.

Without Sarah there was no point to understand. Without Sarah to guard, to care for, to watch over always there was no point in her code; no point in her hardware given software to function. Without Sarah, Cameron had more in common with this pointless corridor turned pool than any living, breathing person beyond the doors sealed shut at either end.

The water lapped over her waist, triggering more dermal temperature warnings from her secondary systems which went utterly ignored. Cameron waded forwards aimlessly, unsure of exactly where she was supposed to go or exactly what she was supposed to do trapped in here. Long brown locks stuck stubbornly to her pale features, joining the simple plastic-coated green two-piece gown which had long since turned into a virtual second skin.

Water continued to cascade down from the ceiling without end, ever-deeper to the point that the Terminator's personality code triggered the entirely human reaction to lift her chin up to bring it out of the freezing water. Were she truly such – truly flesh and blood down to the bone and organs rather than down to the endoskeleton – she would be lifted from her feet by the body's natural buoyancy, desperately treading water in a doomed survival instinct designed by evolution, not automation, to stay alive.

Cameron weighed fully twice as much as a man of average height and build and her feet remained firmly planted to the deck, even as the water climbed over her mouth and nose. Were she a product of the biological union between man and women; mother and father, honed to walk upright under the sun over millions of years, she would be enduring the ignominy of suffocation. The overwhelming desire to draw a breath even though parting the lips would be to invite a watery grave.

To feel the blood darken to a wine red in your veins, as the last atoms of oxygen were spent on the energy required to dart your eyes wildly and claw at the water, as if the air could somehow be separated from the waves by frantic thrashing and lunging. To feel your throat burn while your flesh is chilled down to the bone, then numbed until it cannot be felt at all.

As a machine Cameron suffered through none of these agonies, even managing to find a small relief as her hair was lifted up from her temple and chin and carried by the action of the water as it sloshed between the concrete and steel walls, climbing above the crown of her head.

Her secondary systems noted the change in the composition of the fluid inside her throat from gas to liquid, and adjusted the oxygen-extraction pump beneath her breast plate accordingly. For as close to Humanity as sometimes she felt, Cameron was reminded plainly of her inescapable nature – no person could shrug off being submerged in freezing waters so easily as if it were not even worth noticing.

Craning her neck upwards, the lithe Terminator watched the water find its way barred by the arched ceiling. Ironically, like her, it could go no further.

Although water was a poor choice of transmitter for sound, combined with the auditory sensors Cameron possessed – which were far more sensitive than the keenest natural ears – she was nonetheless able to detect the sound of the hydraulic actuators of the door ahead beginning to whine, as the heavy bulkhead began to retreat upwards into a recessed cowling.

Forced to take a step forward simply to steady herself as the entire volume of the water in the corridor sloshed forward, the Terminator could plainly see without any of the advancement her HUD offered that the area beyond was likewise flooded.

Disappointing.

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"Water is every bit as important as anything you prove here," Colonel Stephen Lavenrunz barked, his large arms folded across his chest protectively. The shadow cast by the small visor reaching out from the peak of his officer's cap shielded Der Meder from the worst of the grey gaze, undoubtedly boring through the back of the good doctor's skull and out through his forehead.

If the tension weren't so thick as to be a palpable jacket he could wear around his shoulders, Eliot would laugh. He supposed that even if the result of these combat trials led to a new weapon – a new way to disable their metal enemy all the more swiftly, Der Meder would still find himself shunned, mocked and cast out. He was doubtful there was anything, as far as the Colonel would ever be concerned, that the doctor could create or discover that would ever impress him.

Fortunately for Eliot – and the principle reason he had not been escorted up to the former flight deck to be hung by the neck until dead – was that the Colonel's immediate superiors, some of the most influential men outside the Chief of Staff of the Army, had the vision and understanding necessary to appreciate that the contribution one man could make to victory in war was not automatically the physical; that a mastery of the rifle and a desire to perfect the bayonet charge was not necessarily the only sacrifice that could be made.

Der Meder made the intellectual sacrifice – toiling away in obscurity with his only company the junked, the corroding and the disabled remains of whatever blasted components eventually found their way down to him.

Peering through the angled, armoured viewing ports which looked down on the perimeter of the concrete circle, fifty feet deep and filled to its brim with sloshing, freezing water Eliot could just about make out the compact form of the girl, as she stepped through the isolation corridor and into the arena-of-sorts.

Of course she was not really a girl, but she was different, and she would be his greatest work. As far separated from the Termination Units yet encountered as the modern infantry pulse rifle might appear were it to gun down a half-dozen men-at-arms, outside the doomed walls of their stone keep. She was a technological revolution and a mechanical marvel – a marvel almost destroyed by men like the Colonel, who fought this war as if it were taking place against something as pitiful as other mere humans, a hundred years ago.

"I appreciate the cooperation, Colonel," He answered eventually though his eyes remained fixed on the fine adjustments being carried out by his hands. "I appreciate resources are scarce and none more so than water and food but I'm sure you'll agree, precautions have to be taken based on the capabilities of the Termination Units ..."

Lavenrunz almost snorted, instead lifting the cap from the top of his head and along with it the shadow cast over his features, robbing Der Meder of the dubious favour of being able to avoid looking directly into the officer's eyes. "Capabilities to escape a missile silo? There is no route to the surface for fifty metres above our head to the launch doors and the blast pit below was designed to withstand the energy released by a launching Titan II ballistic nuclear missile.

"The blast doors for entry into the pit are forty-inch thick titanium composite with a three-stage multi-lock. The silo itself is made from reinforced concrete five metres thick in all directions protected by a steel armour originally included to survive strategic bombing by enemy air forces before launch."

Stephen did not look at all impressed, as he leaned forward towards the observation ports and caught sight of the compact Terminator or at least, her outline – shimmering and obfuscated by the artificial lake-of-sorts filling the bottom of the silo. " … And now you've filled it with water."

" … And now I've filled it with water," Eliot murmured, his attention still utterly focused and held hostage by the submerged machine far below. How did Skynet know what beauty was? Presumably the enemy knew how to reduce it to binary; to one and zeroes, to machine-code because somehow it had managed to make the Terminator walking an ocean-floor of his making, beautiful.

Realising the Colonel was still expecting an answer, Der Meder pulled himself back to reality, however grudgingly. "It's a simple but effective security measure. Even though I still cannot identify the primary metal used in the construction of her – its – endoskeleton, and even though whatever it is, the metal is considerably lighter than materials of comparable strength, it is still very heavy.

"The combined volume of the water makes for a very good restriction on their freedom to move. It will also make it considerably easier to deactivate them at the conclusion of--"

"Enough," Lavenrunz interrupted with a wave of his brown, leather-gloved hand. "Get on with it, doctor."

Eliot nodded absent-mindedly, scraping the top of his forefinger at the plastic switch underneath his sweaty palm. Eyes remaining fixed on the captivating machine fashioned in the image of a beautiful young girl, he could barely contain the excitement such a fascinating project could bring if he were only granted the chance to learn the secrets and mysteries of her construction.

There was still time, he reassured himself as he idly flicked the switch upwards. A single green lamp flickered to life, lighting not much more than the silver ring of its surrounding locking collar. From his vantage point high above the floor of the silo's blast pit, De Meder could make out a swirling, frothy vortex of disturbed water angrily rushing between gaps ever-widening as the blast door opposite groaned and creaked; forced upwards by hydraulic fluid pressurised to many atmospheres.

Eliot glanced up from his control board and across at the broad-chest Colonel, who dipped his head in confirmation. "Begin the combat trial."

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"You are without doubt the sorriest piece of shit I have ever had the displeasure of watching fail, Connor!" The voice cried with an equal mix of disdain, amusement and fury. "By all means take it easy – kick back and relax; if this is all you've got they'll be marching you back to the gallows by sunrise!"

Sarah gathered the thick, sticky saliva stained with the sickly, metallic tang of blood from the roof of her mouth and spat it out across the ground – alongside the churned earth smeared about her lips and chin from the impact of her face against the ground. Gritting her teeth together, she forced herself up on arms trembling with the exertion of hours spent running, jumping, ducking, dodging, pulling, pushing and any number of exercises between.

The instructor's voice had lost not a decibel of authority, or loudness, in the many hours spent screaming instructions loud enough to be heard over an artillery barrage. "You fed-up yet, Connor? Just say the word and we can call this done – you ain't fooling anyone, especially not me. I've seen your kind before so do us both a favour; the time I'm wasting with you is better spent polishing the boots I'm going to use to deliver my foot up your ass!"

But Gunnery Sergeant Hartman of the United States Marine Corps was wrong. He had personally pushed countless recruits to the point of physical and mental breakdown and beyond; so that they could no longer hold back the tears which mingled with the sweat that trickled from faces pushed into the muddy quagmire, underneath a body too weary to lift itself back up to standing. He had asked the ultimate question of each and every man and woman and found some to be lacking, perhaps through no genuine fault of their own but nonetheless, unsuitable for service.

Sarah was no closer to being broken than Hartman was closer to taking it easy on any sign of weakness or failure. The very burning in her muscles caused by lactic acid, searing the fibres faster than her blood could wash away the poison, invigorated rather than diminished her. The raw challenge of butting wits, stamina and heads with the man standing above her was an intoxicating rush which would not leave her to sink into the soft ground, defeated, until she could not draw enough breath to keep her eyes open.

He was willing her to fail – not simply hoping but doing all he could to force her to surrender, to force her accept that she was not good enough under his watch and so would never be good enough. There was something so wonderfully refreshing about being pushed to her limits by another person who could not crush skulls with their bare hands, or hold a tank back by its axle or otherwise rely on the metal underneath their flesh to give them superhuman abilities.

Drill Instructor Hartman had very breakable bones, flesh easily lacerated and a life that, in the grander scheme as far as sentient robots operating in the sky, on the land and in the sea were concerned, could easily be snuffed out without a further thought. Yet the eyes which did not waiver from Sarah's, were filled with a pride that could not be broken with all the arsenal of terrible weapons at Skynet's disposal. Eyes that carried the marshal honour and courage of a proud military tradition stretching back centuries.

Stretching back to a time when men fought other men with nothing more than the technological cutting-edge of a blade – with dreams of walking, talking mechanical men a fantasy on the minds of the men who would many decades later find the fiction of science on their lips and on the end of their quills, pencils, pens, typewriters and keyboards.

That tradition was now examining Sarah brutally, exhaustively and utterly to see if she was worthy of carrying it onwards. She would not be found wanting.

Sucking in a final lungful of air to steady herself, Sarah launched herself forwards and fell back into the same run which had carried her who-knew-how-many miles from the Kitty Hawk – through the towering buildings and sprawling complexes which made up what she had finally discovered to be Hampton Roads. The name carried on an immaculately maintained archway of steel beams, bent to meet each other and Sarah's first chance to be sure of exactly where her boots were pounding against.

"That's real cute, Connor!" Hartman roared as he kept pace effortlessly, somehow with enough free oxygen to fuel his deafening roar. "You're still the sorriest piece of shit on this base – you think just because a piece of shit runs, it's worth something? You going to have to run around the fucking world before you're anything but a piece of shit with strong legs. Do you get me, Connor?"

He leaned in, the spray of spittle leaping across the short distance to wet Sarah's cheek, mouth open more akin to a lion's widened jaw in a roar. "Do you get me, you piece of shit!"

Regretting the saliva she'd spat out earlier now that her mouth was so painfully dry, her tongue rasping against the inside of her gums, Sarah coughed the words up from somewhere deep inside; "Sir I get you, sir."

Hartman was not so easily satisfied, shaking his head ruefully, "I didn't get that, Connor. Bring it to a halt!"

Sarah winced as the hamstrings and quadriceps below her waist, already deadened by the strain of keeping the forced march up to pace, strained to do the work ordered of them. Barely resisting the urge to lean over to catch her breath, as her heart thundered to supply the blood so desperately needed by muscles drowning in their own toxins and waste products, the merciless drone of the Gunnery Sergeant punctuated her fatigue.

"Gentlemen!" Hartman enthused, as Sarah found the strength to lift her head up and watch the instructor as he brought a passing group of United States Navy ratings to a halt. "This sorry piece of shit thinks she's got what it takes to be a solider!"

Hartman crossed back over to where Sarah tried to concentrate on sucking in enough oxygen to sate her weariness, crouching down on his knees to look directly up into her eyes. "How far do you think she's got to go?"

"Halfway around the fucking world, sir," One of them drawled as he elbowed another with a Cheshire Cat's grin on his features. "Not far enough!" Another bawled, the group devolving into laughter and whooping as they settled into the game. Anger boiled up through the tiredness and Sarah briefly entertained the thought of knocking each of them halfway around the world, or at least on their collective asses.

Stretching her legs instead, she drew comfort in the fact that there was still the energy left in her body to do so. She was not beaten yet.

"Ready to run across the Atlantic, Connor?" The Gunnery Sergeant bellowed. Having had a few minutes of precious rest, Sarah knew how to pass this particular test. Setting her back ramrod-straight as if her spine passed out and down to be fixed into the ground, she set her gaze directly ahead into nothingness. "I'll see you in England … Sir."

The very slightest grin seemed to ghost across Hartman's weathered face – so quickly that Sarah could not be sure it hadn't simply been a play of the shadows underneath the lip of the instructor's wide-brimmed campaign hat. "That'll be all," He snapped at the sailors who had the good sense to snap a salute in response, and busy themselves disappearing through the countless alleyways and walkways which split Hampton Roads a thousand ways.

"Is that so, Connor?" He barked, head held so closely that his hot breath flushed her cheeks a rosy red in the chilling wind of a December night on the east coast. Sarah's natural instinct – almost overpowering instinct – was to step back and regain her personal space but to break the challenge, to submit, would have undone every sinew stretched and muscle bruised in the effort she had made to date.

Sarah held the line, defiantly. "Yes sir."

"We'll see," Hartman replied thoughtfully, chewing his lip as if considering something of great important. "Drop and give me fifty."

Men and women drawn from the United States Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard gave a wide berth to the woman grunting and hissing with the effort of hauling herself up from the cold concrete, to a full arm's extension and holding it there. Most did not even break their stride at the very epitome of life in the military – being forced to suffer was good for the soul, after all and the bedrock of discipline in a force where every member was a trained killer of one form, or another, or indeed many.

Some shared knowing smiles with each other, perhaps having been in a very similar position – perhaps even under the baleful, merciless glare of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Clasping their palms together to recall the numbness which spread through the fingertips, knuckles, writs, elbows and shoulders as the instructor counted off five, ten, fifteen, twenty; recalling the fire which burned through their bones and the muscles tethered to them as the instructor counted off thirty, thirty five, forty.

Remembering the sweet cool of the concrete, as they pressed their sweat-soaked faces to the ground at the blessed sound of the bark of "Fifty."

One or two did not share a smile but their eyes lingered as if they too had been in that very same position. Not simply similar but the same – their lives forfeit but rescued from the barrel of a gun or the noose of a rope at the barest moment before their blood ran over a crisp white shirt, or their feet desperately groped for ground that had been taken away from underneath them.

Hampton Roads and the soldiers who constituted its vast armies did not care for the personal pain of Sarah Connor. There was a war to fight, after all.

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The flat of Cameron's bare, deceptively fragile foot crashed into the armoured steel opposite with enough force to bend the plate inwards and enough strength to send the man behind the shield backwards; up against the pull of gravity to thud against the reinforced concrete of the silo's wall, utterly spent.

Unfortunately no mere man stood behind the shield, which in itself was merely an extension of an armoured, bipedal ancestor-of-sorts to Cameron. Stood almost twenty feet tall it lumbered forwards on two powerful legs ending in squat, ball-jointed feet splayed with four wedge-shaped toes spread in the shape of a bloated cross. Hardened actuators rose out between slits in the metal armouring its thighs, linking up with the cupola above which acted as a waist.

The Terminator of yesteryear was equipped with four arms of which only two were directly useful – the other pair sporting multi-barrelled cannons, which had been sealed shut and starved of the ammunition required to rend flesh from bone and concrete from steel at five hundred rounds a second.

A head-of-sorts, lacking any kind of lower jaw was partially buried into the carapace, anchored to the top of the chest with clamps bolted directly through the temples as if the face itself snarled and screamed and screeched for a release and had to be restrained, for fear it would tear itself from its own body. A cluster of imaging sensors and detectors were mounted to the far side of its head gathered about a larger, circular-shaped lens which tracked Cameron, as the smaller machine circled the larger.

Great gouts of steam gargled and billowed from coolant lines venting across the back of the massive Termination Unit, arranged like the great crested fins of some long-extinct creature from the Jurassic. It lazily swung around, eliciting groans from even the reinforced, steel-backed concrete floor now almost entirely uncovered by the receding flood water, which had all but disappeared through drainage ports opened remotely.

Thick reams of hydraulic fluid dripped through perished seals and imperfectly mated plates, staining what surface water was left to lie on the blast pit's floor a dirty brown and black. Each movement was deliberate and measured – the massive machine did not show the slightest fluidity and clearly its construction owed nothing to grace or manoeuvrability.

Raising one of its enormous cannons to bare, Cameron made no movement to avoid its aim as the barrels began to rotate with a chattering of oiled metal bearings sliding over tempered carbon-plastic. Without anything as useful as a copy of the concise history of the modern world, or a similarly heavy book, this was as good an opportunity to learn something of the bizarre new time line Cameron had found herself thrust into.

Warning indicators flashed across her HUD as a powerful fire-lock radar painted its tracking beam against her slight form, aggressively and blatantly with the energy footprint of a Main Battle Tank thundering across the plains, or the enormous radome of an airborne AWACS as it policed the skies for hundreds of miles in all directions. For all her sophistication in the game of stealth and infiltration, Cameron could no more deflect a radar lock than she could remove the endoskeleton underneath her flesh which lit up as brightly as any star in the sky.

Her sophistication was more than sufficient to easily dodge the swinging cannon, which had been pressed into impromptu duty as a brute club – great clouds of pulverised dust settling over her shoulders from the concrete cracking and shedding above. The massive machine swung around with the thunderous boom of heavy metal feet crashing down against the reinforced floor, Cameron's multi-spectral vision translating the ping of the searching combat and scanning radars into sweeping beams of light more easily tracked – and avoided – visually.

She threw herself flat to the concrete floor with her cheek pressed down against the floor, a fire-lock brushing past above her head as if she lay in a ditch, wary of the guard tower's sweeping spotlight beyond. Leaping to her knees and driving forward Cameron swept through between the titanic Terminator's waist cupola and left arm, so as to come up behind.

Proximity sensors flared in warning – not quickly enough to provide the massive machine with the time to strike the smaller target, but effective enough to prevent it from being outflanked. With the ubiquitous thud of tons of metal underfoot, the hiss of coolant and the dripping of thick, oily fluid the gigantic Terminator continued to paint the silo in every apparent direction with fire-lock and fire-control beams so powerful, any unshielded electronics exposed would not simply be targeted but fused and overloaded from the mere act of discovery.

What followed was a dance between the beauty and the beast in the best traditions of fairy tales, told to the tired children snuggled under their heavy duvets or shared between friends around the flickering, dying oranges and reds of a camp fire reduced to burning the soot of the wood it had devoured so greedily.

There was no music to accompany the pair, unless the crash of steel against concrete and the groan of hydraulic actuators screeching against badly-oiled bearings could be considered the symphony of the machine. Cameron dropped herself to the floor with legs spread one ahead and one behind, the radar beam searching relentlessly but harmlessly as it passed by, continuing in its methodical, grid-mapped searching pattern.

Rolling back to standing she effortlessly leaped upwards, almost bringing her toes in line with her chest as another fire-lock cut through the ground she had stood upon the barest moment before without success or a target. Bending backwards with such dexterity that her fingertips could graze the floor of the blast pit while her toes pointed in the opposite direction, the compact Terminator found the most bizarre, but incredible enjoyment from the evasion.

Free from a love of ballet, Cameron's secondary systems continued to collect vital information on the enemy at hand. Discounting the obvious differences in intended function – the massive machine still searching for her in vain was clearly intended to give battle more in common with a tank, than the infiltration favoured by an alternate-Skynet for her – the other Termination Unit was clearly inferior in numerous fields supposedly perfected in the present they had left, before the future Cameron had been constructed in.

The armouring across its body was a strengthened steel alloy, incredibly resistant to compressive and tensional loads and machined for the business of surviving artillery rounds and shoulder-mounted, rocket-propelled anti-tank grenades. Nonetheless it carried a heavy weight penalty compared to her own coltan construction, giving Cameron a speed and manoeuvrability which seemed a hundred years ahead of the machine before her.

The actuators which powered her own limbs were not all that different to their opposite numbers, though the miniaturisation which allowed her endoskeleton to be downsized to the point it could be successfully disguised so comprehensively was missing in this alternate world – the junked Termination Units she had caught sight of in the Medical bay-of-horrors earlier, were far larger than the conventional T-888s.

And this unit was far larger than even those seen earlier.

Intelligence seemed limited – the unit seemed utterly reliant on a hybrid RADAR/LIDAR system which showed no redundant capability in the face of an enemy which could evade its fire-lock and scanning beams. The search pattern it employed in its attempt to locate a fix were rudimentary and pre-programmed; it was not updating its actions with real-world information.

All these limitations, however, did not count for much when a man – however able to outmanoeuvre and evade a tank – was then tasked with destroying it with nothing more than his bare hands. Unfortunately for Cameron in the role as the lone infantryman, her secondary systems had not yet gathered enough information to suggest anything more than continued evasion.

Or continue dancing, as her Chip interpreted.

Had the Oxygen-Extractor buried beneath her breastplate instead been the heaving lungs of an infantryman, they would be driven empty and burst apart by the enormous wedge of tempered steel which crashed against the chest. The concrete behind her bowed, sank and finally cracked as her body was irresistibility forced through the surface layer – fingertips already wrapped around the colossal arm which held her, but utterly unable to match the strength on show.

For every experience which reminded Cameron of her nature, her origin and her apparently inescapable purpose another would whisper a half-realised dream, that she had bridged the gulf between what she impersonated and what she replicated. As a machine she constantly gathered data on her opponent, formulated new strategies and safeguarded herself all at once, in an instant of thought.

As the human life she was only supposed to emulate, Cameron had allowed her attention to drift, her guard to fall and perhaps the slightest overconfidence to affect the impossibly complex lines of code which were supposed to divide her actions into yes or no; one or zero; black or white. Deep in the equivalent of thought, the compact Terminator had missed the massive machine opposite displaying the base cunning of all the children of Skynet whether antiquated, cutting-edge or distinctly average.

Her secondary systems detected the termination of the RADAR/LIDAR at the conclusion of the final painting sweep and the failure of a new beam to begin – deducing the machine opposite was now relying on a different method of threat location. Perhaps more focused on ballet, her Chip had acted on this urgent information too late to be of use as her body was ground into the concrete.

Through fast-action not inhibited by dancing or more mundane concerns, those same secondary systems were able to re-route the damage inflicted during the initial impact and prevent Cameron from going off-line – avoiding the suicidal prospect of surviving one hundred and twenty seconds to reboot. The machine fashioned in the image of a lithe young girl rolled away from another clumsy blow which crashed into the flayed, chipped concrete crater she had occupied in the wall a moment before.

Climbing to her feet took a moment's concentration – and the full attention of her complex diagnostic and override systems – to overcome a malfunctioning actuator in her left thigh which refused to extend. This involuntary hesitancy allowed her massive opponent to get a visual bearing and once again, the titanic Terminator opposite pressed his impotent rotary cannons into service as massive blunt-force hammers.

Cameron simply allowed her gyroscope-based balancing system to disengage – her body falling limply and quickly under the pull of gravity and her heavy coltan-based endoskeleton. Brown locks were whipped up against her cobalt-coloured eyes, which they tracked the path of the military-grade club as it passed through its swing and found no contact with her body.

The assault cannon instead found contact with the silo wall, which for all its cracking and bending under strain was nonetheless backed-up by five feet of reinforcement beyond. A torrent of viscous, noxious hydraulic fluid spilled from lines severed by the blunt force of the impact – sheared in half by the very armour supposed to protect them from harm. The vast shoulder joint holding the heavy weapon began to fall with the loss of pressure, the barrel-ends slipping down until they aimed at nothing more useful than the floor of the blast pit.

Cameron climbed back up to her feet and watched the massive machine take a step back to steady itself, apparently momentarily stunned by the loss of its target. The single circular lens turned along with the skull it dominated, until the baleful, bright red eye found its opponent – clouds of coolant billowing up from venting grills as massive armoured legs strode into action to carry the bulky, tank-like Terminator towards Cameron.

She did not move an actuator, even as the towering mechanical monster-of-sorts began to pick up speed, great rents in the concrete arcing out to form gaping cracks as many tons of battle-hardened steel repeatedly crashed down upon a floor merely designed to cope with the launch of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

She did not move any more than flaring her nostrils as the stink of hydraulic fluid washed over, intermittent with the tang of metal and grease. The irregular shadow of the colossal Terminator towered high above and over Cameron, a vanguard for the crushing impact only the barest few seconds away.

Complex calculations were computed, double-checked and executed with force-loads, aerodynamic considerations and the laws governing mass and its movement in sufficiently short a time to allow the smaller Terminator to leap up from the concrete, avoiding the massive steel club swung through the spot she had stood upon.

The single circular lens with a diameter almost greater than Cameron's entire head exploded spectacularly as an outstretched foot buckled metal, tore plastic and shattered reinforced perspex into myriad pieces to clink against the surrounding steel and roll off towards the floor below. Taking a hold of the massive machine's skull and using it as an anchor, Cameron vaulted over the top of its wide shoulders.

Squeezing her legs together and pressing the soles of her feet against the flat of the machine's back, Cameron used the tank-like Terminator as a diving board of sorts. She pushed off into the air with the very tips of her toes, breaking contact with the chipped steel a moment before the action of the massive machine's forward momentum met the reaction of five feet of reinforced concrete wall.

The irresistible force met the immovable object in a traditional example of the impossible, though in this imperfect example, the immovable object came away the victor. The enormous machine took an uneven step backwards, the entire left side of its heavy torso leaning down towards the floor as the massive, burnished silver cylinders which made up the actuators of the waist crumpled in on themselves, or slid out from their locking sleeves.

Hydraulic flood leaked in copious rivers, which ran between shredded cabling and found itself herded into valleys created by buckled armour and plating. Twisted by the force of the impact and ruptured, most of the (much) larger Termination Unit disappeared behind thick, rolling clouds of precious coolant which spilled out to hug the ground from broken lines.

RADAR/LIDAR beams erratically flickered across the silo, fading in and out of existence as their amplitude and power fluctuated rapidly. From a position crouched within the small depression created by the force of her coltan endoskeleton as it came to an immediate stop against the concrete, Cameron's HUD's analysis of her opponent lit up with multiple temperature warnings. Components normally bathed in frigid gas began to sweat, as waves of superheated air rolled off the machine opposite.

Cameron did not have to duck any more terrible blows, or display further astonishing dexterity and grace under attack. She did not have to do any more than stand, and watch, as her opponent staggered in its death throes – spilling vital fluid that disappeared into cracks arcing through the blast pit floor. Limbs jerked randomly as actuators fired without order or purpose, control systems failing as their complicated and all-too-fragile internal components literally baked to a shiny, metallic run-off.

Either boiled or exsanguinated to the mechanical equivalent of death, The Termination Unit simply teetered forwards and crashed to the concrete floor without the slightest attempt to save itself or at least lessen the impact. Cameron cautiously circled the pool of hydraulic fluid which marked the machine's deathbed, multi-spectral scans probing the chassis for any sign of a self-repair system in operation, or even the simplest independent power source still functioning.

There was nothing. It was dead.

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The sweat coating the palms of her hands made her grip on the rifle slippery, forcing even more concentration in the fingertips to keep the aim of the barrel steady. Sarah squeezed one eye shut and pushed the other up against the rubberised window of the scope sat on top, ignoring the freezing in her gut as her tank top rode up to press the flesh of the stomach against the cold concrete.

Even with the aide of magnification the target board appeared no larger than the lid of a jam jar to Sarah's single eye, turned on its side and belying its real-world six feet diameter. The red circle on white marking the bullseye could not have been wider at range than a single cent coin, combining with the winds gusting through Hampton Roads to consistently push her aim off to either side.

Her jaw clenched in irritation.

Forefinger snaking inside the trigger guard, Sarah began to slow her breathing – reducing the movement of her chest which further destabilised her aim. She began a countdown, silently in her mind, from five. On a subconscious level she as dimly aware that her heart flexed its powerful cardiac muscle less, as if taking upon itself the task of soothing her nerves.

The bullseye swung lazily into scope's the kill-zone.

"Take your time Connor!" Hartman bellowed, wrecking Sarah's concentration and almost surprising her into squeezing the trigger and putting a bullet through the sandbags arranged for twenty feet in either direction of the target. She cursed underneath her breath, lowering the rifle's barrel and beginning to feel her hands shake in response to the wave of adrenalin, which poured as a torrent into the veins beneath her flesh.

Hartman took no notice, bending at the knees to crouch down and regard Sarah with unrestrained displeasure. "Jam jars don't fire back, Connor. When I said we were going to to the range I didn't mean we were going with your dad to knock cans off a fence with the BB-gun he gave you when you were five. You take the shot before you get shot. You get me?"

"I get you sir," Sarah snapped, bringing the rifle back up to bare. Conscious of the shadow now cast over her – making her aim ever more difficult, certainly deliberately, she craned her neck to the side to stretch the muscle. Blinking her eyes clear, she pressed one up against the scope and brought the weapon upwards to track the target again.

Sucking in a single lungful of air and holding her throat closed Sarah held the barrel lightly, so that the wind could nudge and push at the rifle one way and then another. Finding the mood of the breeze, her grip tightened and pursing her lips she began to exhale steadily. The elusive target swung back into the kill-zone for the briefest of moments.

Sarah snapped the trigger back with a jerk of her elbow, the rifle kicking backwards in response and driving the stock against her shoulder painfully.

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman strolled off into the distance to inspect the thermal burn on the target personally. Sarah watched him retreat through the lens of the scope she still stared through – the cross-hairs finding their mark against the back of the Drill Instructor's head; magnified to such that a miss was virtually impossible and a guaranteed kill certain. She gritted her teeth, finger slowly curling back inside the guard – the madness driven by a subconscious desire, almost reasonable, to remove a thorn which had stopped digging into her side and instead plunged through to rip her gut.

Sarah pressed the trigger lightly. Curiously the wind no longer buffeted the rifle's aim as if, ridiculously, the entire world had come together to give her this chance. Making the conscious effort to engage the safety, she pushed the weapon down against the concrete and sat up from the floor she had laid upon for who-knew-how long – more than a little disturbed at just how tempted she had been to kill him, just how easily she had rationalised it.

"Give it a couple of years and maybe you'll be close enough," He gruffed, as close to a congratulations as any self-respecting Drill Instructor could get. He picked up the rifle sat on the floor and turned it upside down, disengaging the locking pin holding the ammunition clip in place and pulling the firing plate backwards. "So how long did you think about shooting me, Connor?"

"At least you don't bother to hide it, good. Unfortunately killing is one of those things that gets easier the more often you do it," He nodded without waiting for a response as he pulled the bulky clip out from the body of the rifle. "I wouldn't be doing my job otherwise. Still – I'm not stupid, Connor ..."

Pulling a second clip out from his pocket, he slammed it into place before pushing the locking pin back into place and resetting the firing plate. "You only had one charge in the magazine. I wouldn't be doing my job if I took a gamble like that with every single piece of shit that thinks it has what it takes to be a solider."

Hartman decoupled the scope from the top of the rifle, and handed the weapon back to Sarah. "Same thing again," The Gunnery Sergeant ordered. She resisted the urge to sigh as he met her stare in a challenge to give it up, to tell him she'd had enough. "Without the scope?" She asked, dutifully.

"Without the scope," He repeated, eyes already on the target.

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"Impressive," Lavenrunz said finally, several minutes after the end of the duel in obvious favour to the machine he had easily considered the underdog. Leaning forward his eyes passed from the tangled mass of smoking metal drowned in its own hydraulic juices, to the blue gaze which had found his own from the bottom of the blast pit. They looked almost human … Beyond a mere facsimile; as if the girl at the bottom of the silo was every bit as innocent as her graceful features suggested.

The Colonel had fought the agents of Skynet for almost two decades and he had watched them evolve; from tank-tracked, squat boxes to upright, bipedal robots from the best of classic science-fiction regarding metal men from Mars until eventually, they began to pretend they were something else. At first they were merely given a heat-resistant paint job – fleshy tones and eyes drawn on in a gross caricature of a living, breathing person.

Then thick, wiry hair appeared glued directly to their metal skulls. Eventually the paint disappeared to be replaced by foam dyed a light pink, and glass eyes probably liberated from hospitals turned slaughterhouses – their walls painted red and crimson to the wails of the dead and the dying. The only possible solace could be that perhaps, those in need of artificial replacements didn't see the carnage being unleashed until it was upon them.

The very latest models he'd personally witnessed sported some type of synthetic flesh – still easily recognisable by its hairless, smooth appearance and lack of pigmentation but nonetheless Skynet was learning. This machine which stared up at him however, was not a simple step forward in logical thinking. It was an astronomic leap of understanding which spelled the doom of the war effort if it was a vanguard for what was to come.

Had Stephen not seen the glinting metal beneath the split flesh himself, he could not have believed it. From his understanding a computer was a piece of hardware governed by the code written to support it – this code was binary in nature; a collection of ones or zeroes, yes or no. He could understand, even as a solider and not an engineer, how that code could be turned easily enough to killing.

Enemy? One/Zero. If zero take no further action; if one, eliminate. Repeat. It was not difficult to see how an entire war could be waged on such logic. How then could Skynet as he understood it have succeeded in capturing the essence of a person? The image of the girl was beautiful – radiant and delicate; how could beauty be rendered down to binary? How could it be captured in one and zero?

It made no sense to the Colonel, but it was nonetheless an abomination. A slavering, hungering wolf in the innocent fleece of a lamb. The thought of an emotionless, utterly logical foe which was incapable of grasping the concepts which underpinned human civilisation; humility, honour, compassion, love and a dozen others was horrifying enough. To imagine that same foe with the new-found ability to deceive – to lie so that it could walk into the enemy's camp through its very gates unmolested.

Such a thought was beyond mere fear. There were not the words in the human sphere of experience to describe it.

The crumpled remains of the Terminator-tank lying a short distance away was all the empirical proof even a sceptic could ask for, that what lay beneath the machine's visage of a young girl was anything but human. Lavenrunz folded his arms across his broad chest, "I've seen enough."

De Meder sucked in a lungful of breath as if his very life depended on the next few moments, which in truthfulness it most likely did. If the Colonel could not see through the petty hatred which blinded him so completely and ordered the destruction of his greatest work, what reason could there be not to volunteer to walk to the gallows himself? Every other machine lying half-corroded, totally forgotten in his workshop was insignificant – irrelevant compared to this wonderful discovery.

Surely he could see this? Surely the Colonel realised the potential breakthroughs which sat down there, behind those rapturous blue eyes? Eliot's attention began to wander as he felt his gaze melt through the armoured glass itself. She was so perfect, so beautiful … It would be more than a privilege to study her, to see how Skynet digitised perfection so. It would be a gift from a god beyond this world to study the shining metal beneath the flawless, pale flesh …

Bringing himself back into the moment, De Meder tried to gauge something – anything – from the Colonel's eyes and the impending decision his voice would bring. For every fibre of the doctor's body which felt sure he would see the potential and the strategic worth of continuing, a nagging doubt argued plainly that soldiers were trained to kill, to murder and destroy; they were not engineers and they were not scientists.

Eliot almost envied Skynet's ability to bring all three together flawlessly.

The support of the upper brass of the Army was irrelevant in the here and now – if Lavenrunz ordered his men to destroy his greatest work, they would carry out his orders. That the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Army himself supported De Meder's work was largely meaningless; the bond between front-line officers and the men surrounding them was stronger than the strange alloy which the girl – the machine – below was composed of.

Even if the Colonel flagrantly ignored his orders, ironic in a man so set in upholding the traditions of the military in discipline and all things, he would almost certainly be no worse for it. One did not reach Flag-Officer rank without earning the respect required to rail against authority, however occasional.

Powerless to do anything but await the decision, Eliot satisfied himself with gazing down at the wonderful machine below, so that if his eyes were his stomach he could eat and drink his fill of her.

Shrugging the olive-green greatcoat over his broad shoulders, Colonel Stephen Lavenrunz retrieved the peaked officer's cap from the control panel opposite and placed it atop his head. Tugging a brown leather glove onto his right hand to match the left, he swept towards the door.

"Continue the combat trials," He said simply before disappearing through the bulkhead. De Meder could hardly contain his excitement and the dumb nod in response, not even seen by the retreating officer, was all he could do to contain it. Just about able to wait-out the clang of the heavy door as it swung shut with a resounding thud, Eliot busied himself with the controls at hand and allowed a wide smile to split his lips.

She was so wonderful and for a little while longer, she would still be his.

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Cameron cocked her head to the side as she watched the taller of the two men disappear – her HUD instantly providing sufficient magnification and record-checking to confirm him as the same Colonel who had so surprisingly and decisively defeated her in an earlier confrontation. Unfortunately, from the Terminator's viewpoint, there would be no second round.

Despite her combined computing power being put to task there was no obvious – or secretive or unlikely – way out of the silo save through the blast doors on either side, and then again only if they were so kind to open them.

They remained stubbornly closed, leaving Cameron helpless even as the all-too familiar sound of rushing water reached her Chip. She craned her neck upwards in time to be forced to take a step back as a torrent of freezing water fell from the darkness of the silo above, soaking her hair and flesh. Dermal temperature warnings were triggered, and ignored, as Cameron began to suspect the secondary purpose behind the use of the water.

Her Chip, her secondary systems and her tertiary systems were all in agreement and proven right in the one one-hundredth of a second it took for the electrical charge to be introduced into the silo, conducted through the water, conducted through her endoskeleton and into her cognitive systems. Disabled as surely as if her Chip itself had been tugged from its port, Cameron fell to the concrete below with a thud barely disguised by the water already two feet deep.

No sooner had the water, disturbed by the considerable weight of her endoskeleton fallen back to join the greater flood, than one of the blast doors began to cycle upwards with the groan of metal against metal. Darting underneath so quickly to almost strike his forehead on the rim of the bulkhead as it retreated, De Meder fumbled for the screwdriver he held in shaking hands.

Dropping to his knees and into the freezing water, he pulled Cameron's head up and onto his lap – carefully spreading the sopping brown locks away from the access port he had repeatedly memorised the location of. A quick glance at the digital watch strapped to his wrist provided a countdown of the time remaining before the reboot, and his likely death. Levering the tip of the screwdriver's flat blade enthusiastically into the flesh, the hiss of released pressure confirmed his aim.

Dropping the screwdriver into the flood waters, Eliot snatched a less-than-gentle looking pair of snub-nosed pliers from his pocket and promptly buried its snout into the newly-exposed port. His fingers flexed repeatedly as the water and his own sweat combined to make his grip slippery, and pliant. The pliers repeatedly twisted away, banging against the access port or failing to find purchase on the grasping mount of the CPU itself.

Snapping the jaws closed about the very top of the Chip and squeezing the handles together as tightly as the strength in his fingers would allow, Eliot placed a steadying hand on the top of Cameron's head and jerked back with the opposite elbow – his wristwatch beginning to bleat the end of the countdown as he did so.

Falling backwards into the water with a loud splash, the doctor's eyes frantically looked up to the pliers still held in his hands. Relief washed over him as surely as the freezing water did; the precious silver cylinder still securely held in its snout-nose.

Taking a moment to feel its slight weight in his palm before tucking it into his top pocket, Eliot waded across the blast pit and reached down, under the water where Cameron lay totally submerged. Tenderly he ran a fingertip down her temple and across her cheek, marvelling at the sight beneath him.

"Rest easily, my Sleeping Beauty," He soothed at the distorted, glassy-eyed doll's face which stared straight through him from beneath the lapping, oil-stained waves. "You are my greatest work ..."

* * *

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* * *

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* * *

Sarah eased herself down gingerly against the mattress, as if it were made of solid steel and not designed to take the weight from her aching body. Sweeping her long legs up with the twinges of muscles pulled and pushed beyond their tolerances, she laid her head down against the single pitiful pillow and let out a long, keening sigh.

The sound of a series of locks turning and engaging echoed out from the door to the billet – prospective soldier or not, she supposed that by the word of the law she was still a prisoner and to be treated as such; locked in a box and forgotten when not in use.

The bed creaked on its wrought iron frame, shifting at the slightest movement of her hardly-considerable weight. A dozen other beds took up either side of the billet but hers was the only one occupied – the rest stripped of their linen and mattresses and reduced to empty frames. Sarah tried not to read into such a powerful metaphor.

She cupped a hand to the small of her back, nursing the vertebrae which continued to protest at being forced to bare the weight of hundreds of crunches and dozens of miles of running. Her backbone would have to be satisfied with joining the very long list of body parts pushed to their absolute limits by the gruelling, merciless regime of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.

The flesh of her underarms was tender to the touch after hundreds of sit-ups and a half-dozen smooth walls to clamber over. Her thighs were hot to the feel after hours spent assaulting a punching bag – faded red-and-blue plastic burst at the seams to vomit its foam filling out across the gym floor, creaking pleadingly on rusted bolts radiating cracks into the ceiling mount above.

Her head spun with the combined efforts of directing the running, jumping, sparring, climbing and above all else, the raw stamina required to drive on – to push through the pain barrier and then the agony barrier, to deny the Drill Instructor the pleasure she knew he would take in washing her out back to a cell.

And then, perhaps, back to the gallows.

Despite the stiffness setting in deep inside her very bones and their joints, Sarah's eyelids began to droop. The thin sheen of sweat which had plastered her forehead, tickling so despite the relative reward of a shower earlier, and the general fidgeting of a body not yet at the end of its adrenaline come-down could not unite to provide a strong enough resistance to the crushing fatigue.

Her chin dropped to the side of the mattress, the worries of this new world fading alongside her consciousness.

"Get the fuck out of that bed, Connor!" A voice roared, such that were a B-52 to choose that moment to begin dropping ordinance directly overhead it might have had competition to the ballistic cacophony it generated with thousand-pound bombs. "That wasn't a request – put some god-damned pants on and make yourself presentable!"

Sarah almost snapped her spine in two as she bolted upright, her back squealing in agony but nonetheless overridden by instinct. Confused eyes found a powerful, focused stare which almost drove the sleepiness from her bones to be stored to return at a later date, with vengeance. Throwing her legs over the bed with such force that the iron frame shifted half a foot backwards, Sarah snatched up the sand-coloured pants discarded earlier and made short work of pulling them around her waist.

"If you need a few more hours don't hesitate to ask," Hartman barked rhetorically, beginning to circle Sarah as if inspecting the condemned stood on the trapdoor before he pulled the release lever. "Sleep well, Connor?"

"Sir yes sir," She answered defiantly, no small amount of anger now replacing the once-pure motivation to prove the veteran opposite wrong. At this stage she supposed it did not matter how she kept up – only that somehow, she managed to keep up.

He nodded, turning abruptly with a snap of his boots against the floor and heading towards the door leading out from the billet, "Time to hit the bricks again, Connor. You're with me."

At least she wouldn't be running back to the gym.

* * *

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* * *

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* * *

"Do you know how many reprieved I've had in for this dance?" Hartman asked, without looking at Sarah as they both made their way along the narrow alleyways dividing the billets set aside for recruitment. A crescent moon hung in the sky by a string, gathering a wispy collection of cloud about her middle as if preparing a bed of her own in lieu of the approaching morning. A million points of light twinkled in a background stretching across the entire galaxy, each star separated from another by impossible distances.

Still, they seemed so much closer together in our sky. As if the Milky Way gathered about the Earth to watch the scenes which unfolded; as if one could turn an entire planet into an amphitheatre for the entertainment of the stars. Sarah glanced at the Drill Instructor, offering a simple shake of her head.

"Four hundred men and women," He replied with eyes dead ahead. "Four hundred have accepted the offer of the army to step off the trapdoor, or stand up from the chair facing a dozen rifles. Four hundred have ran until they vomited, then ran until they couldn't stand up and then ran until they got back to their beds and I gave them permission to collapse. Four hundred shot the same target a hundred times from a hundred positions until they were so far away they couldn't even see it."

Sarah's eyes were pulled from the night sky to the towering island of the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, which peeked over the buildings they passed between. Powerful searchlights mounted in swinging cradles swept the edge of the former flight deck and the rusting prow. Blinding shafts of white light picked up the rows of rivets joining each section of steel to its neighbour, generating the occasional shadow of a rifle menacingly held ready to fire as it passed over the sentries walking their patrols around the ship's structure.

Sarah's stomach sank so that it could fall no lower without smothering her diaphragm – this ship which once stood as a testament to the projection – and the idea, however convoluted – of liberty instead now stood of the loss of freedom and, ultimately, the loss of life at the hands of the state. This ship which had so nearly become her grave and had been left behind, in the real and palpable hope of something better, now loomed as if to welcome her back to hopelessness.

Hartman returned the salute offered by the sentry manning one of the dozen boarding ways climbing high above the ship's waterline, making short work of the steep climb. "Four hundred men and women accepted service in a penal regiment … Do you know how many made it out of basic and into those regiments, Connor?"

"Zero!" He punctuated with the banging of his palms against the guide rails of the walkway. "Not a single one of those four hundred had what it takes to serve in the United States Army – not just sign on the dotted line to get their bed and their rations, like most of them did that ended up here. I mean serve in the sense I served before this whole sorry affair with walking robots and supercomputers ever came about. I mean serve like real soldiers, Connor."

Sarah did her best to draw breath even as she felt her gut conspire to choke her. Briefly entertaining and then rejecting the possibility of simply leaping over the edge and into the murky black of the Atlantic ocean, she dutifully followed the Drill Instructor through the labyrinth of bulkhead doors and rusting steel corridors.

"Four hundred failures," Hartman repeated, pausing before a door to rap his knuckles against the reinforced metal. "What's your lucky number, Connor?"

She offered the veteran a lop-sided smile and the slightest shrug, "Four hundred and one?"

* * *

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* * *

Sarah had been here before – literally. The two folding chairs opposite a polished table, crowned with a percolator that had seen better days and two stainless steel mugs. She wondered, absurdly, if the coffee inside was the same black stuff she'd choked down before. The same broad chested Colonel stood opposite, folding his greatcoat over a chair and sweeping the officer's cap from his head.

Lavenrunz returned the salute offered by the Gunnery Sergeant, taking a seat as he poured himself a mug of coffee. He brought the bitter, sour liquid to his lips and savoured its harsh, biting after-taste. Setting it back down on the table, he leaned backwards slightly and brought his gloved hands together.

"I gave you one chance to avoid your sentence, Connor," He began without any drama in his voice or prejudice to a decision already made. His gaze travelled to the Drill Instructor, and the pair exchanged glances which had, at least to Sarah's understanding, obviously been swapped four hundred times before. "Gunnery Sergeant?"

Hartman's eyes found Sarah's, utterly unreadable. "She has what it takes, sir."

And with all of the drama, all of the possibilities, consequences, outcomes and chances the deal was sealed and delivered – every moment spent since scraping the tips of her toes against the trapdoor beneath the noose around her neck, well-spent and utterly justified.

The Colonel showed no surprise worthy of the first apparent success in four hundred attempts. "That'll be all, Gunnery Sergeant," He ordered – nodding in acknowledgement of the sharp salute he received, before the instructor turned on the spot with the click of polished boots. Sarah was left instead with the buoyant feeling of her diaphragm free of the weight of her gut, as the bulkhead door swung open and shut with a resounding clang.

"Coffee?" He offered, filling a mug Sarah knew she would never touch. "Very impressive, Connor. Four hundred recruits to not a single soldier was not an encouraging ratio but you took it as your own. I hear you managed to hit the target without a scope ..."

Lavenrunz shifted forwards, his own mug forgotten, "There's no time for celebration, Connor – now begins our real work. It is time to prepare for a mission that will push you far beyond anything Hartman inflicted on you, beyond anything you might have experienced before."

Sarah resisted the urge to flinch – if that were somehow true, taking into account she had personally battled Skynet itself once upon a time and faced down and defeated countless avatars of its relentless will, the reality of what might be waiting for her was barely comprehensible.

"You will assemble a four-man team drawn from the prison population of the Kitty Hawk, and any ancillary staff you might think useful. You must ensure you select a broad palette of battlefield skills and you must choose very carefully, Connor."

The questions threatened to leave Sarah's mouth more than one at a time, "Colonel … What's the mission? What're we going out there to do?"

"The mission is classified," Lavenrunz replied unhelpfully, "And we're going out there to take the fight to Skynet. As always. At this stage I am prepared to tell you, Connor, so that you are in no uncertain terms about what will be facing us, that this mission is such that it has been entrusted to a penal regiment instead of a regular unit. Draw your own conclusion."

Pushing his chair back the Colonel climbed to his feet, a grimace flashing across his stone-carved features as if he had a distaste for what he was about to say. "One further thing – I have been … assured that mission success will be greatly enhanced through the use of a Termination Unit. Their capacity for destruction is unrivalled and we may come to find its combat capabilities useful."

The slightest hope sprang up inside Sarah – a single green stalk, climbing up from its soft pod buried deep beneath to peek out of the cold soil.

"One particular Termination Unit has unrivalled infiltration ability compared to anything I have seen, it may be useful in more than one role to the mission. I am sure you are familiar with it; you were captured alongside it. I have no doubt that the Termination Unit can be controlled, I would not even consider taking it if I thought otherwise. I must know however, that you can be relied upon to do your duty."

He crossed his arms over his chest, "However it abused you, however it convinced you to go along with the attack which almost ended up with you being executed, the worth it promises against Skynet can't be reasonably ignored. Can you handle being in close proximity to it again?"

Cameron.

The green shoot spread a surrounding crown, a dazzling array of petals which curled outwards and dried underneath the sun. Hope germinated, growing exponentially at the thought that a reunification – of any sort – might come to pass. Having long learned to divorce the expression on her face from the feelings inside, Sarah remained impassive. She nodded slowly, "I can handle it, Colonel … If it brings us closer to giving Skynet a bloody nose, I can handle it."

Pulling his greatcoat over his shoulders, Lavenrunz nodded. "Very good. You have one week to make your selections and present your final team to me."

The Colonel reached into the deep pockets of his coat and withdrew a cerulean-coloured, felt-covered box. Snapping it open and promptly setting it down on the desk within Sarah's reach, Stephen held out a brown, leather-gloved hand. "Congratulations, Lieutenant. The provisional authority of the rank is now yours with all its privileges and responsibilities therein."

Sarah met the hand with one of her own, loosely, her eyes unable to pull away from the shining rank pins which sat snugly on their black cushion. Even in a world where sentient machines were able to engage in cat-and-mouse games of hide and seek across time itself – as if travelling across decades was as easy as meeting on a battlefield to decide a final victor, this could not ever have been guessed at.

Even knowing her son was destined – in this time line already ascended in some way – to lead the resistance of Humanity and thereby claim the position of Supreme Commander of the Free Earth Forces, she could not have chosen a path for herself like this.

Lieutenant Sarah Connor, United States Army.

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To be continued ...


End file.
